The essay first succinctly points out shortcomings in previous interpretations of Plotinus’ notion of beauty. Beauty is to be connected primarily with Intellect, which is to be understood as a special unity in diversity. The section of the essay devoted to aesthetics is therefore preceded by a short analysis of Intellect’s unity and diversity. The hypothesis about the primary relation of beauty to the Intellect is then corroborated by a reading of Ennead V.8 and further developed. The emphasis is on (...) three basic aspects of beauty: its being a unity of a mixture whose character is shared by all ontological levels; its function of referring to what is above it; and its fundamental accessibility. Though Plotinus opposes the Stoic notion of beauty as symmetry and stresses beauty’s simplicity, it follows for him that beauty has the character of unitas multiplex, albeit a special one. (shrink)

The thesis investigates Plotinus' concept of beauty. Chapter 1 focuses on two methodological issues: development in Plotinus' thought and topics of the concerned Enneads. Since Plotinus wrote two Enneads directly devoted to this topic which were numbered and named by Porphyry I.6 On beauty and V.8 On intellectual beauty, these two treatises are addressed first in the context of other relevant Enneads. The outcome of these chapters is that beauty is primarily to be found in Intellect and that it is (...) closely linked with unity in multiplicity, so this topic is further investigated in more detail. Five mutually interconnected perspectives Plotinus assumes to describe the unity in multiplicity specific to the Intellect, are outlined. Two of them that are related to the nature of intellection and intelligible objects are discussed in chapters 2 and 3. The one related to Intellect's genesis is analysed throughout the thesis. Therefore, most of chapter 4 focuses on the remaining two perspectives which are connected with Intellect's hierarchical and structural unity in multiplicity. In chapter 5, Ennead VI.7 is analysed in order to deepen the concept of beauty and refine its relation to the Good, life and other predicates. The last chapter presents a systematic... (shrink)

В монографии в широком историческом контексте охарактеризован процесс возникновения и развития сущностного наполнения принципа природосообразности в истории филисофско-педагогической мысли от античного периода по Новое время.

The doctrine of idols is one of the most famous aspects of Bacon's thought. Yet his claim that the idols lead to madness has gone almost entirely unnoticed. This paper argues that Bacon's theory of idols underlies his diagnosis of the contemporary condition as one of ‘universal madness’. In contrast to interpretations that locate his doctrine of error and recovery within the biblical narrative of the Fall, the present analysis focuses on the material and cultural sources of the mind's tendency (...) towards error. It explains the idols in terms of Bacon's materialist psychology and his exposé of the debilitating effects of language and traditional learning. In so doing, it highlights the truly radical nature of the idols. For Bacon, the first step towards sanity was to alert people to the prevailing madness. The doctrine of idols was intended as a wake-up call, preparing the way for a remedy in the form of his new method of inquiry. The paper concludes by indicating how Bacon's method aimed to treat ‘universal madness’, and it suggests that his diagnosis influenced John Locke. (shrink)

Ellen Fox and collaborators have produced the most detailed description of healthcare ethics practices in the United States available. Some findings are shocking for anyone committed to promoting q...

The article discusses the problem of the possibility of knowing the future, especially the future of social phenomena compared with the future of natural ones. This problem is formulated as a dilemma: the future can be explored or can be only constructed. The idea of constructive character of knowledge of the future is viewed in two possible interpretations.The first one is a special case of the constructivist interpretation of knowledge, according to which different pictures of the future are arbitrarily constructed (...) on the basis of information about the past and current state. The second interpretaion can be presented in the form of a praxeological question: what should be an action in relation to the future, first and foremost to the future of social phenomena - cognitive or creative. It is shown that, in the first case, there is an ability to interpret knowledge of the future from the point of view of epistemological realism, in the second case, both cognitive and creative types of activity as a pragmatic position in relation to the future are necessary and cognitive activity cannot be reduced to creative one. It is also shown that forecaster’s dilemma reflects the problematic nature of forecasting under the conditions of transformation of scientific rationality and point of view of common sense, which is observed in recent decades. (shrink)

We considered peculiarities of the evolution of a region with sharp boundaries that is filled with a partially ionized plasma and is a part of the volume of a condensed target. The creation of such a region in the near-surface layer of the target can be related to the action of an external impulse symmetric ionizator or to the action of an intense small-extension shock wave on the target surface. We defined the conditions such that their fulfilment during the establishment (...) of the equilibrium between the Coulomb attraction of electrons and ions with atom ionization multiplicity Z* 1 and the kinetic pressure of electrons causes both the compression of this region and its ionization to the state with Z* 2 > Z* 1. The last leads to a further additional compression and ionization. Under these conditions, the spontaneous avalanche-like ionization of atoms of the target to the state of ‘‘bare’’ nuclei occurs synchronously with the avalanche-like metallization and the self-compression of the target. We showed that the avalanche-like ionization and the self-compression of the target happen in the case where the gas of degenerate electrons has drift momentum. If the region with initial ionization has the form of thin spherical layer, the process of avalanche-like ionization and self-compression of the target in this region is accompanied by the accelerated movement of the plasma layer to the target center. One of the reasons for the accelerated movement is the surface tension in a bounded domain of the nonequilibrium plasma layer neutralized by ions of the target. With increase in the velocity of movement of this layer to the target center, the additional self-compression of the system of electrons and nuclei to the state of degenerate electron gas occurs. At the leading edge of the running layer with extremely high electron density which is neutralized by nuclei of the target, the formation of a collapse of the electron--nucleus system proceeds, and the binding energy maximum for the electron--nucleus system shifts from A≈60 to A ≫ 60. This result makes possible the fast synthesis of superheavy nuclei. The decay of the collapse state, a partial restoration of the target structure, its rapid cooling, and the condensation of a part of the products of nuclear reactions happen in the target volume at the trailing edge of the moving plasma layer. Upon such a scanning propagation of the wave with high electron density, all the target substance is involved, step-by-step, to the process of nuclear transformations. At the target center, the moving plasma layer is squeezed with the formation of the state of quasistationary collapse under inertial confinement. Then the collapse state decays irreversibly. (shrink)

Purpose of this article is the historical reconstruction of the studies in philosophical anthropology in Soviet Ukraine. Theoretical basis. In the philosophical tradition of independent Ukraine, there is an opinion that at the intersection of the 1960s and 1970s, there was an anthropological turn in the national philosophical thought. The authors provide a holistic and comprehensive reconstruction of philosophical understanding of man in the works of Ukrainian thinkers of the Soviet era. Originality. It has been proved that before the emergence (...) of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Ukraine Academy of Sciences and the restoration of the Philosophy Department at Kyiv State University, the writings of Ukrainian philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s emphasize specifically the "ideological" factor of human existence. Based on the materials of M. Maksymovych Academic Library and the library at H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, there have been revealed and traced the specific features and peculiarities of the transformation of main accents in philosophical and anthropological studies of Soviet Ukrainian researchers in the post-war period. Conclusions. The studied problems developed in Soviet Ukraine in two vectors. The focus was on man as a social phenomenon and a "product of ideology" on the one hand, and, on existential aspects of a human being with its internal contradictions, understanding of its nature and the sense of existence, on the other hand. It has been established that the anthropological problems were the focus of not only scientists of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Ukraine Academy of Sciences, but also of teachers of Kyiv State University. The authors grounded the thesis that, unlike the 1940-1950s, when the focus was on philosophical problems of natural science and philosophical personology, the 1960s bring forward not only philosophical and anthropological studies but also ethical and aesthetic issues, logic and scientific atheism. (shrink)

In this article I describe the implicit conceptualization of social order which exists in Death Stranding — localized in both the setting and the mechanics of the game — and compare it with the conceptualization of Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan”. First, the theoretical tension between Death Stranding and “Leviathan” is traced: the speculative conceptualization of the Leviathan and the procedural conceptualization of Death Stranding are compared by clarifying the role that the concepts of action, authorization, right and sovereignty play in Hobbesian (...) theory and the video game. Sec­ondly, the theoretical tension between the political and natural capacities of the Sovereign according to Hobbes is explicated; with the help of mate­rial from Death Stranding, a variant of its resolution is proposed, suggest­ing the conceptualization of the Sovereign-without-a-body: an instance devoid of physical capacity and materiality, yet still capable of maintaining social order as a product of its activity. Subsequently, attention is paid to the mechanics of state expansion in Death Stranding: I describe and analyze how the Sovereign-without-a-body’s messenger — the protagonist of the video game — interacts with people outside the Sovereign’s zone of influ­ence, convincing them to consent to return to the commonwealth. This theoretical move makes it possible to supplement Hobbes’s binary scheme of the state of nature and commonwealth with a third concept — the state of memory, in which the memory of the Sovereign turns out to be a deci­sive factor influencing whether the commonwealth will be restored to its former boundaries. By explicating the Hobbesian theory of imagination, I demonstrate that — in the state of memory — the Sovereign is contingent, not fully defined, and virtual. (shrink)

The reasonable human nature appears in the Enlightenment’s philosophy as a reduction of the human being and its manifestations to a complex of natural impulses when all former norms of perception, reflections, inclinations, actions and the moral principles, which lie in their basis, are canceled in the free human self-experimenting. The monarchy idea depreciates when its citizens turn in the public good’s proponents on the basis of a blind republican consent about the egoism’s limitation (Robespierre) and a prosopo-peia of freedom (...) that gives to a nation the self-government illusion. The reconsideration of the revolutionary moment as a self-affirmation of romantic spirit is connected for Tolstoy with the “world will” novel poetics opening evolutionary moment in the affective and reflexive dynamics of the hero’s consciousness, the limiting witness of the narrator and the author’s horizon of progressive movement to the historical process’s purpose that creates the belief in the need of coexistence with other participating consciousnesses. The revolutionary and evolutionary reflection of Tolstoy is related to the monoteis-tic prosopopoeia of divine kenosis. From an artistic representation of signifying articulations of the evolutionary world the teacher’s reflection of Tolstoy is born. For Tolstoy revolution is the moment of the senseless violence aiming to eliminate the common evil of the world. The conceptual basis of literary culture as an art and ideological formatting of reactive consciousnesses for Tolstoy is an infinite aspiration to the human self-limitation. (shrink)

The article deals with the peculiarities of the formation of the concept of freedom of human in the philosophy of history of Russian thinker at the beginning of the nineteenth century P. Chaadayev. Formation of spirituality and general worldview-philosophical principles in Russian philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century had their own peculiarities and differences from Western philosophy. Rationalism and individualism, as specific characteristics of Western philosophy did not satisfy the representatives of philosophical thought in Russia.The dominant principles in (...) philosophical culture are community, catholicity, versatility, reflecting the distinctive character of socio-political development. Representatives of Russian philosophy assumed that the next stage in the historical development of mankind should not be social separation, but reunification in a qualitatively new social unity. P. Chaadaev was the first in early nineteenth century, who conducted a complex philosophical analysis of the specifics of worldview and historical development of the people, forming the general foundations of the philosophy of history. Problems of historical development, morality, and religion determine the cognitive process and the synthetic interdependence of freedom of the will man’s will and necessity. Freedom of will is determined by cognitive abilities and spiritual and practical activities that bring it closer to «higher law», the syncretism of God’s wisdom. (shrink)

Книга написана образно, хорошим литературным языком, что делает ее интересной и доступной самому широкому кругу читателей. Книга отличный подарок для любознательного читателя.