The study provides an insight into the structural features of the famous VIII century Buddhist treatise Tattvasaṅgrāha by Śāntarakṣita with regard to the text’s main purpose ( prayojana ) as it is treated in Kamalaśīla’s commentary Pañjikā. Any text along with its referential (representational) function of conveying message - meaning to the addressee, or its expressive function, reflecting the author's attitude to what is communicated, also performs the ‘appellative’ function, encouraging the recipient of the message to act. This function which (...) could also be called praxiological was always significant in Indian text culture, since from the times of Veda-s it was embedded in its very core. This function is of paramount importance in the case of Indian religious and philosophical texts, whose main aim is to convince and transform the consciousness of their percipients. Along with linear models of message transfer, Sanskrit texts could demonstrate non-linear semantic structures, transmitting the main idea of the text indirectly. It is exactly how one should perceive the message of Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasaṅgrāha according to the suggested by Śāntarakṣita’s prominent student Kamalaśīla in his Pañjikā -commentary to the treatise. He proposes to consider Tattvasaṅgrāha not as a thematically heterogeneous encyclopaedic or doxographic work, whose main objective is to refute different non-Buddhist views (as it is often treated by scholars now), but as a text, which by its very design exposes one of the most important Buddhist principles - the law of the dependent origination ( pratītyasamutpāda ). The themes, discussed in a number of the chapters of Tattvasaṅgrāha, indeed, appear to have direct correlation with the characteristics of pratītyasamutpāda given to it in Śālistamba-sūtra - an early Mahāyāna text, which explains this universal law. Kamalaśīla suggests looking at Tattvasaṅgrāha as at one big unit-sentence - mahāvākya, with the exposition of pratītyasamutpāda as its unitary purpose-meaning ( abhidheya ). In this context, the treatise functions as a praxiological tool for the ‘installing’ into the consciousness of the text’s addressee the knowledge of ‘true principles’ (tattva-s) of pratītyasamutpāda. This interpretation of the main message of the text raises also a question of the adequate translation of the name of the treatise into other languages, because, according to Kamalaśīla, ‘ Tattvasaṅgrāha’ means the ‘Assembly of Principles-(tattva’-s)’ which specify precisely pratītyasamutpāda (pratītyasamutpāda-viśeṣaṇāni tattvāni). (shrink)

The article deals with the issues of comparing the teachings of Tolstoy and Lao-zi according to the criterion of palingenesis, which is the basis for the construction of the entire ideological corpus of the most important treatise of Taoism “Tao de jing”. Lao-zi formulated the lapidary formula of palingenesis in the fortieth zhang of this treatise, recreating a picture of the harmonization of the Middle Kingdom, arguing that return is the movement of the Tao, and weakening is the action of (...) the Tao. The principle of palingenesis is one of the fundamental principles for which Tolstoy uses Christological vocabulary, and Lao-zi uses embryological vocabulary. The choice of the palingenesis criterion for comparative analysis of the teachings is due to the fact that the latter works as an immutable law when setting the task of recreating harmony in social chaos. Based on the assessments of the content of the zhangs of the “Tao de jing” canon, a representative line of palingenesis elements is built: the category of knowledge/truth; the category of ignorance; the category of simplicity; the category of naturalness; the category of “baby”; the category of non-action; the category of nonviolence. The principles of Taoism are not expressed by Tolstoy with a research sequence in logical definitions, but appear as categories and trends, working in the worldview of the Yasnaya Polyana sage. In the works “What is my faith?”, “Sayings of the Chinese sage Lao-Tse”, “Non-doing”, Tolstoy's teaching is presented in its entirety and is therefore convenient for comparison with the Taoist classics. It is noted that Tolstoy's conceptual idea is based on the desire to convert people to the good - unity with all people. This orientation towards the good is nothing else than the return to man of his original nature, on the way to which the principle of palingenesis associated with the boycott of the civilization of violence is realized. The conducted research has shown that in the teachings of Lao-zi and Tolstoy, which record the experience of theoretical exploration of the world, the categories of palingenesis are common to the Russian and Chinese spirit. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the correlation between the direct and the mediated in activity, consciousness and personality. Cultural-historical psychology, attitude theory and activity theory were solving the tasks of overcoming the ‘postulate of directness’, which led to the ‘postulate of mediation’. None of these postulates shows in its entirety the path of human psychological development and the work of human consciousness. The direct and the mediated are examined in this article as equally necessary conditions for the development of the (...) human psyche. A lot of attention is paid to the nature of the initial, primary spontaneity of a child as an indispensable condition for mastering culture. The direct is the necessary condition for the development of culture, and the mediated is the mechanism of this development. (shrink)

Understanding has usually been seen as a method of hermeneutics. Until recently, philosophers of science paid little attention to the topic of scientific understanding because they came to the conclusion that understanding can be nothing more than a psychological by-product of scientific activity. However, many scientists believed that understanding was an important aim of science. The article states that understanding is a universal cognitive phenomenon applicable to the knowledge of not only cultural and historical phenomena, but also natural objects and (...) processes. Understanding does not oppose explanation; some types of the latter produce scientific understanding. In the course of criticism of the standard model of scientific explanation, the first concepts of “scientific understanding” arose – unifying and causal-mechanistic. A pragmatic approach to scientific understanding is also considered, linking it to the cognitive skills of a scientist or a group of scientists. (shrink)

The article traces the crisis of intellectual and political situation in which the Vienna Circle operated. It is shown that the struggle against metaphysics was a common task of its participants. Forms and methods of metaphysical criticism are considered. The role of neo-Kantianism in the formation of logical empiricism is evaluated. The origins of the profound rift in German-speaking, and then Western philosophy as a whole, are analyzed.

The article is based on the concepts of epistemic virtues and epistemic vices and explores A. Einstein’s contribution to the creation of fundamental physical theories, namely the special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity, as well as to the development of a unified field theory on the basis of the geometric field program, which never led to success. Among the main epistemic virtues that led Einstein to success in the construction of the special theory of relativity are the (...) following: a unique physical intuition based on the method of thought experiment and the need for an experimental justification of space-time concepts; striving for simplicity and elegance of theory; scientific courage, rebelliousness, signifying the readiness to engage in confrontation with scientific conventional dogmas and authorities. In the creation of general theory of relativity, another intellectual virtue was added to these virtues: the belief in the heuristic power of the mathematical aspect of physics. At the same time, he had to overcome his initial underestimation of the H. Minkowski’s four-dimensional concept of space and time, which has manifested in a distinctive flexibility of thinking typical for Einstein in his early years. The creative role of Einstein’s mistakes on the way to general relativity was emphasized. These mistakes were mostly related to the difficulties of harmonizing the mathematical and physical aspects of theory, less so to epistemic vices. The ambivalence of the concept of epistemic virtues, which can be transformed into epistemic vices, is noted. This transformation happened in the second half of Einstein’s life, when he for more than thirty years unsuccessfully tried to build a unified geometric field theory and to find an alternative to quantum mechanics with their probabilistic and Copenhagen interpretation In this case, we can talk about the following epistemic vices: the revaluation of mathematical aspect and underestimation of experimentally – empirical aspect of the theory; adopting the concepts general relativity is based on (continualism, classical causality, geometric nature of fundamental interactions) as fundamental; unprecedented persistence in defending the GFP (geometrical field program), despite its failures, and a certain loss of the flexibility of thinking. A cosmological history that is associated both with the application of GTR (general theory of relativity) to the structure of the Universe, and with the missed possibility of discovering the theory of the expanding Universe is intermediate in relation to Einstein’s epistemic virtues and vices. This opportunity was realized by A.A. Friedmann, who defeated Einstein in the dispute about if the Universe was stationary or nonstationary. In this dispute some of Einstein’s vices were revealed, which Friedman did not have. The connection between epistemic virtues and the methodological principles of physics and also with the “fallibilist” concept of scientific knowledge development has been noted. (shrink)

The article соnsiders the socio-cultural aspects of the standard model (SM) in elementary particle physics and history of its creation. SM is a quantum field gauge theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions, which is the basis of the modern theory of elementary particles. The process of its elaboration covers a twenty-year period: from 1954 (the concept of gauge fields by C. Yang and R. Mills) to the early 1970s., when the construction of renormalized quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory wеre (...) completed. The socio-cultural aspects of SM are explored on the basis of a quasi-empirical approach, by studying the texts of its creators and participants in the relevant events. We note also the important role of such an “external” factor as large-scale state projects on the creation of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, which provided personnel and financial support for fundamental research in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics (the implementation of thermonuclear projects took place just in the 1950s, and most of the theorists associated with the creation of SM were simultaneously the main developers of thermonuclear weapons, especially in the USSR). The formation of SM is considered as a competition between two research programs (paradigms) – gauge-field and phenomenological, associated with the rejection of the field concept. The split of the scientific community of physicists associated with this competition is going on during this period. It’s accompanied by a kind of “negotiations”, which in the early 1970s lead to the triumph of the gauge field program and the restoration of the unity of the scientific community. The norms and rules of the scientific ethos played the regulatory role in this process. The scientific-realistic position of the metaphysical attitudes of the majority of theorists and their negative attitude to the concepts of philosophical relativism and social construction of scientific knowledge are emphasized. Some features of the history of SM creation are also noted, such as the positive role of aesthetic judgments; “scientific-school” form of research (in the USSR), its pros and cons; a connection to historical-scientific “drama of ideas” with “dramas of people” who made a wrong choice and (or) “missed their opportunities”. (shrink)

The study relevance lies in understanding strategic objectives' content concerning intelligent technologies’ application. The development and application of artificial intelligence in various branches of human activity carry the potential for global changes in society, which, in methodological terms, increases the relevance of considering these problems. The study of ethical problems of artificial intelligence in the concept of sustainable development of society is connected with the dynamic development of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which are considered a process of becoming a (...) new technosubject in the context of neuroscience development. The article emphasizes that the development of artificial intelligence acts as an innovative form of technology development when a new kind of human-machine technosubject is formed. The authors identify social problems of artificial intelligence application as the digitalization of life becomes a global anthropological challenge. Innovations of artificial intelligence are directly related to a number of ethical problems, as they contribute not only to the sustainable development of society but also cause dehumanization of relations between people and society. Based on the analysis of qualitative changes in scientific and technological research, using human-machine devices is becoming inevitable. Humankind must develop ethical guidelines for the application of AI systems. (shrink)

We are a Sophiic people, we are subjects of Sophia and must be chivalrously loyal to our queen. That is the guarantee of our existence, for "Russia" and "Russian" without Sophia is a contradiction.

ABSTRACTThe social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures varying in (...) social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resour... (shrink)

LetMbe a countably infinite ω-categorical structure. Consider Aut(M) as a complete metric space by definingd(g, h) = Ω{2−n:g(xn) ≠h(xn) org−1(xn) ≠h−1(xn)} where {xn:n∈ ω} is an enumeration ofMAn automorphism α ∈ Aut(M) is generic if its conjugacy class is comeagre. J. Truss has shown in [11] that if the set P of all finite partial isomorphisms contains a co-final subset P1closed under conjugacy and having the amalgamation property and the joint embedding property then there is a generic automorphism. In the (...) present paper we give a weaker condition of this kind which is equivalent to the existence of generic automorphisms. Really we give more: a characterization of the existence of generic expansions (defined in an appropriate way) of an ω-categorical structure. We also show that Truss' condition guarantees the existence of a countable structure consisting of automorphisms ofMwhich can be considered as an atomic model of some theory naturally associated toM. We do it in a general context of weak models for second-order quantifiers.The author thanks Ludomir Newelski for pointing out a mistake in the first version of Theorem 1.2 and for interesting discussions. Also, the author is grateful to the referee for very helpful remarks. (shrink)

The content-analysis of the Russian federal and regional basic legislation on the cultural policy has indicated a need in a deep revision of all existing regulatory legal acts, which support the state cultural policy implementation towards building a universal terminology and vesting the functions on the cultural policy implementation in the government as opposed to the statement of the departmental specific approach to the culture.

Предлагаемые материалы могут представлять интерес не только для специалистов, но и для широкого круга читателей.

The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

For over a century, Haeckel's Gastraea theory remained a dominant theory to explain the origin of multicellular animals. According to this theory, the animal ancestor was a blastula‐like colony of uniform cells that gradually evolved cell differentiation. Today, however, genes that typically control metazoan development, cell differentiation, cell‐to‐cell adhesion, and cell‐to‐matrix adhesion are found in various unicellular relatives of the Metazoa, which suggests the origin of the genetic programs of cell differentiation and adhesion in the root of the Opisthokonta. Multicellular (...) stages occurring in the complex life cycles of opisthokont protists (mesomycetozoeans and choanoflagellates) never resemble a blastula. Here, we discuss a more realistic scenario of transition to multicellularity through integration of pre‐existing transient cell types into the body of an early metazoon, which possessed a complex life cycle with a differentiated sedentary filter‐feeding trophic stage and a non‐feeding blastula‐like larva, the synzoospore. Choanoflagellates are considered as forms with secondarily simplified life cycles. (shrink)

In addition to probabilities of monetary gains and losses, personality traits, socio-economic factors, and specific contexts such as emotions and framing influence financial risk taking. Here, we investigated the effects of joyful, neutral, and sad mood states on participants’ risk-taking behaviour in a simple task with safe and risky options. We also analysed the effect of framing on risk taking. In different trials, a safe option was framed in terms of either financial gains or losses. Moreover, we investigated the effects (...) of emotional contagion and sensation-seeking personality traits on risk taking in this task. We did not observe a significant effect of induced moods on risk taking. Sad mood resulted in a slight non-significant trend of risk aversion compared to a neutral mood. Our results partially replicate previous findings regarding the presence of the framing effect. As a novel finding, we observed that participants with a low emotional contagion score demonstrated increased risk aversion during a sad mood and a similar trend at the edge of significance was present in high sensation seekers. Overall, our results highlight the importance of taking into account personality traits of experimental participants in financial risk-taking studies. (shrink)

Sorensen says that my assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it is meant to undermine your justification for believing truly that ∼p, not to make you believe that p and that, therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. It has been objected that they are meant to deceive because they are intended to make you more confident in a falsehood. In this paper, I propose a novel account according to which an assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it (...) is intended not to provide evidence that p but to make you stop trusting all testimonies concerning whether p, which is how they undermine your testimonial knowledge. Because they are not intended to provide evidence that bears on the truth of p, they are not intended to make you more confident in a falsehood; therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. This makes them a problem for the traditional account, which takes the intention to deceive as necessary for lying, and an interesting example of Kant's idea that allowing lies whenever one feels like it would bring it about that statements in general are not believed. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a kind of delusion in which the patients judge that their occurrent thoughts are false and try to abandon them precisely because they are false, but fail to do so. I call this delusion transparent, since it is transparent to the sufferer that their thought is false. In explaining this phenomenon, I defend a particular two-factor theory of delusion that takes the proper integration of relevant reasoning processes as vital for thought-evaluation. On this proposal, which (...) is a refinement of Gerrans’s account of delusion as unsupervised by decontextualized processing, I can have all my reasoning processes working reliably and thus judge that my delusion is false but, if I cannot use their outputs when revising the thought itself, the delusion will persist. I also sketch how this framework explains some interesting cases of failed belief-revision in the general population in which people judge that ~p but nonetheless continue to believe that p. (shrink)

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply. Focusing on the essential concept of well-being, it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

In this paper, I argue (1) that the contents of some delusions are believed with sufficient confidence; (2) that a delusional subject could have a conscious belief in the content of his delusion (p), and concurrently judge a contradictory content (not-p) – his delusion could be transparent (Krstić 2020), and (3) that the existence of even one such case reveals a problem with pretty much all existing accounts of lying, since it suggests that one can lie by asserting what one (...) consciously and confidently believes is true, and (4) sincerity, since it suggests that asserting a proposition you believe is true is neither sufficient nor necessary for sincerity. If I am right about (1) and (2), then (3) and (4) follow easily. Therefore, the paper is mainly devoted to an analysis of transparent delusion and defending (1) and (2). (shrink)

In this excerpt, Vladimir S. Bibler attempts to show that the initial concepts of mechanics that were formulated in the 1660s are paradoxical; they result in contradictory concepts. However, this p...

ABSTRACT Two models of the Aristotelian syllogistic in arithmetic of natural numbers are built as realizations of an old Leibniz idea. In the interpretation, called Scholastic, terms are replaced by integers greater than 1, and s.Ap is translated as “s is a divisor of p”, sIp as “g.c.d. > 1”. In the interpretation, called Leibnizian, terms are replaced by proper divisors of a special “Universe number” u < 1, and sAp is translated as “s is divisible by p”, sIp as (...) ‘l.c.m. < u”. Both interpretations are proved to be adequate to the Aristotelian syllogistic. They are extended to syllogistic including term negation and term conjunction as well. (shrink)