The article discusses the significance of the figure of Adam in the artistic philosophy of Acmeism. Particular attention is paid to the functioning of the image of biblical Adam in the works of Nikolay Gumilyov and Osip Mandelstam. Their texts present the first man not only as the epitome of the poet and bearer of an unclouded view of the world but also as a symbol of the balance between the earthly and the heavenly principles. For Gumilyov, Adam is also (...) an example of manhood and fortitude. The poet creates an original Adamic myth re-evaluating the Fall as a test given to man by God. According to the plot of the myth, the purpose of human life is to seek and attain Paradise. Mandelstam turns to the image of Adam much less often encoding the ideas of Adamism by various means. The poet openly distances himself from the version of Adamism created by Sergey Gorodetsky sharing implicitly the ideas presented in the works of Gumilyov. (shrink)

From the editors. Our society, too, is apparently not uninterested in problems associated with such mysterious phenomena of the human psyche as clairvoyance, telepathy, and telekinesis. Expectations and hopes with regard to psychosurgical intervention on the human organism thrive; ideas of reincarnation and life after death, the interaction of our civilization with supposed inhabitants and civilizations of the Universe , the influence of the natural-cosmic environment on human destiny , or, on the contrary, man's independence of natural laws are widespread. (...) The corpus of these ideas has a life of its own , is becoming institutionalized, is successful in lobbying for its interests, and is becoming an influential force in society, generating a unique emotional atmosphere that combines fear of the future with hopes that fate is more favorable to man than would be warranted from the picture of the world painted by modern science. (shrink)

This paper considers the article by V.P. Filatov from the perspective of the role played by logic in a thought experiment. It is shown that this role depends on the way reasoning ant its correlation with logical inference are interpreted. It is suggested to view a model developed within informal logic as the most relevant to the role V.P. Filatov assigns to a thought experiment (turning the layer of implicit knowledge into explicit).

It is argued that anthropologists become moral relativists by mistake typically in two ways: (1) by confusing moral with factual discourse (dubbed the Normativist Fallacy) which derives in turn from a failure to distinguish adequately between direct and indirect discourse in the description of moral systems and preferences; or (2) by confusing definitive with hypothetical statements in descriptive ethics (the Definitivist Fallacy). Two representative arguments illustrating these errors are analyzed and some morals drawn from the results regarding the status of (...) relativist arguments in descriptive ethics and the prerogatives of applied anthropologists. (shrink)

Criteria of quotationality vary in nonlinguistic symbol systems, and there is the question whether quotation is even possible in some contexts. For instance, can one painting or dance movement quote another? If a painting is autographic, how can it be duplicated in a pictorial quotation? And if scored dance gestures can be duplicated like words and sentences, what then corresponds to the reference giving quotation marks in language—stage-winks fore and aft? This is enough to show that different arts have different (...) problems with quotation centering around the separate issues of establishing criteria of duplication and of reference. (shrink)

Исследование иллюстрируется примерами анализа самого современного искусства в сферах живописи, театра, кино, литературы.

The attitude that ordinary language description of experience is in fact a description of the world is called “naïve realism.” There is an entire branch of modern Western philosophy that is devoted to critically examining the assumptions behind the everyday language we use to describe the macroscopic world in which we live and the validity of naïve realism as an adequate description of the world. This branch of philosophy is called “ordinary language philosophy.” Surprisingly, it has something in common with (...) quantum physics: insight into the inadequacy of ordinary language to describe observable reality. It is this connection between ordinary language philosophy and quantum physics that we shall explore in this article. In the process, we shall also offer a basic introduction to both basic philosophy and basic quantum theory. (shrink)