In joining a discussion of the subject, object, method, and other specifications of culturology, one should first define one's view of the correlation between culture and history, culturological and historical knowledge, the purposiveness of history as a social movement, and its certainty as a science. From the point of view of positivist philosophy and the social science based on it, history a priori lacks any teleology, goal-orientation, or inner meaning and is simply the sum of the collective life of people. (...) I would even risk defining the historical process as a dynamics of people's realization of the collective forms of their life activity and an accumulation of justified models of the corresponding social experience. In that case, historical knowledge can be defined as a special way of describing and systematizing the most socially significant processes and results of people's realization of their sociality, that is, technologies of collective existence. I draw attention to the fact that what we are talking about, first of all, is the way we-the interested people-have chosen to describe past events we had systematized in some way or another on some suitable basis. In itself, history is not a living entity and cannot have any independent goals, meanings, intentions, or other manifestations of free will, which are characteristic of a freely acting human individual. (shrink)

That form shall correspond to the content of a work is a law of realist art. Marxist-Leninist esthetics, on the basis of discovery of this law, does not prescribe an invented norm for the artist, but generalizes from the experience of art itself. Methodologically, it takes as its point of departure the dialectics of content and form. In so doing, Marxist-Leninist esthetics does not dissolve in philosophical concepts the distinctive features of content in art and the nature of form. It (...) examines the unity of content and form, and their development, in the context in which they manifest themselves specifically in art. In other words, it investigates the esthetic features of the relationship between content and form in art. (shrink)

In November 1969, the USSR Academy of Sciences' Presidium held a discussion on the principal lines of work being engaged in by the Academy's Institute of Philosophy. A report on this matter was presented by the Institute's director, P. V. Kopnin, Member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Participants in the discussion of the report were M. V. Keldysh, President of the USSR Academy, Academicians F. V. Konstantinov, M. B. Mitin, A. M. Rumiantsev and P. N. Fedoseev, and Corresponding Academician (...) Ts. A. Stepanian. (shrink)

From the Editors. November 1980 marked the seventieth birthday of the prominent Soviet estheticist, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, and Honored Scholar of the RSFSR Avner Iakovlevich Zis'. In publishing his article, the editors take the opportunity to congratulate the author on this occasion and to wish him health, good spirits, and further creative successes.

Lenin's work "On the Significance of Militant Materialism," written in the spring of 1922, is justly regarded as the philosophical testament of our leader. In it, the tasks of the day were merged with the tasks of the entire epoch on the basis of a profound analysis of reality.

Non-classical logic via approximation of self-referential sentences by dynamical systems are consistently presented. The new 6-valued truth values (here A=Liar, V=TruthTeller) are presented as a function of the classical truth values xi ∈ {0,1}, which resulted in a philosophical standpoint known as Suszko’s Thesis. Three-valued truth tables were created corresponding to Priest’s tables of the same name. In the process of constructing 4-valued truth tables, two more new truth values (va, av) were revealed that do not coincide with the four (...) original ones. Therefore, the closed tables turned out to be 6-valued. Prof Dunn’s 4-valued truth tables are compared with our 4-valued truth tables. De Morgan’s laws are confirmed by six-valued truth tables. Constructed 3-, 4- and 6-valued lattices obeying De Morgan’s laws. (shrink)

Heidegger and Badiou are not likely to be received as philosophical figures inheriting much in common. The only obvious ground which backs both thinkers is that of ontology as primary focus of their intellectual endeavors. However, this is divergence between their philosophies what makes an attempt to reveal some other conceptual foundations their doctrines have in common so important for a historian of the recent transformations in philosophy. The concept of subject looks as an indicator of differences between Heidegger and (...) Badiou, since Heideggerian destruction of the metaphysics of subject is opposed by positive and affirmative indoctrination of subject developed by Badiou. Affirmative concept of the subject implies certain references to Heidegger's negative hermeneutics of the Modern subjectivity where it says about reactionary subject or dark subject. As we see Badiou skillfully attunes his conception to the profound destructivity of Heidegger's negation of subject. What these two thinkers share is certainly the need for a middle term between totality and unifying force of being and particularity and contingency of the individual human life, which would be efficient in denoting the very transition of the particular into the common. The early Heidegger of decisive Dasein can be regarded as a forerunner of the Maoist revolutionary subject of Badiou, with its prophecy of becoming a historical driving force and gathering the strength of the particular around a traumatic Event. For both Heidegger and Badiou the "movement" of truth proceeds trough a series of choices which cannot be governed by a law or "an algorithm." The indiscernible truth forces a subject to permanently find him/herself amid the "undecidable." The procedure of fidelity traverses the existent knowledge. One can scarcely know whether an event has taken place, one can rather bet upon its truth. For both philosophers the concept of truth is indissolubly connected with the problems of ethics. Heidegger points to the "most primordial truth," which is the "truth of existence." Abiding in this truth, Dasein discloses itself to itself and discovers its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. (shrink)

The article presents a case study of ethno-linguistic policy in the ethnic Republics of Central Russia (the Chuvash Republic and the Republic of Tatarstan), with special emphasis on the analysis of language acts and correlated legislation. It raises an important problem concerning the efficacy of the Language Laws and their conceptual foundations. One of the main assets in facing this problem is adequate reflection on the actual ethno-linguistic situation by the legislature, ensuring peaceful and productive social development. Analysis of the (...) conceptual fundamentals and the concrete language laws in action as well as instrumental interaction shows a wide range of factors influencing the efficacy of policies. Acknowledgement of the bilingual situation by the legislatures of the Republics manifests a valuable perspective on productive development, provided the language laws are implemented intelligently and supported in the educational and cultural spheres. Multilingualism as a universal form of socialization should be recognized as a valuable opportunity and receive the necessary legislative support. (shrink)

Niels Bohr was born on October 7, 1885. He was one of the great innovators in physical science in the twentieth century. It so happens that 1985 also marks fifty years since the long discussions, which had begun in the 1920s between Albert Einstein and Bohr on the philosophical problems of quantum physics, attained their apogee. An article co-authored by Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, "Can Quantum Mechanics Be Considered a Complete Description of Physical Reality?," was published in 1935 (...) in the journal Physical Review. According to Bohr, "by virtue of its clarity and, it would seem, flawless argumentation, the work of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen has created excitement among physicists and played a great role in the discussion of general philosophical questions of physics." Precisely as a result of the publication of this article, the critical position of Einstein concerning quantum mechanics became known to a broader circle of physicists. In the same year, Bohr responded to Einstein and his co-authors with an article under the same title. (shrink)

This study aimed to examine how anxiety related to different styles of coping during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these relationships were moderated by the cultural orientations of individualism/collectivism and a person’s sense of meaning in life. A sample of 849 participants from Georgia completed an online survey during the final stage of lockdown. To measure the main variables, we used the State Anxiety Inventory, the Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism Scale, the Meaning of Life Questionnaire, the COVID-19 Worry (...) Scale, and the Ways of Coping Scale tailored to COVID-19 pandemic. The latter measured rational coping via the subscales of information accessing/processing and action-planning coping, and affective coping – via the subscales of passive-submissive and avoidant coping. Results suggested that anxiety positively predicted both affective coping styles and negatively predicted the action-planning coping style, while COVID-19 worry predicted all coping styles; presence of meaning in life positively predicted both rational coping styles and negatively predicted the avoidant coping style, while search for meaning positively predicted all coping styles; individualism negatively predicted the passive-submissive style and positively predicted the action-planning style, whereas collectivism predicted all coping styles; furthermore, individualism and collectivism moderated the link between anxiety and the passive-submissive coping style, presence of meaning in life moderated the link between anxiety and avoidant coping style, while search for meaning in life moderated the link between anxiety and the action-planning coping style. Overall, the findings enrich the cultural transactional theory of stress and coping, and generate insights for the culture-sensitive approach to the meaning in life. The results were conceptualized vis-a-vis Georgia’s intermediate position between clear-cut individualism and clear-cut collectivism. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

In the domain of the Ukrainian history of philosophy one can clearly observe symptoms of eclecticism, contamination, and methodological ambiguity. Such situation is rooted in continuous insufficiency of the methodological framework of Ukrainian philosophy, split by competing ideological structures. Critical condition of humanitarian epistemology is aggravated by the urgent need to overtake foreign studies in the corresponding field, which constantly increase in number and evolve in character. The article aims at critical assessment of methodological approaches to historical philosophical analysis within (...) the light of current philosophical studies. Analysis of the relevant literature on the problem of how to identify the character of interference between the target philosophical discourse and the discourse of the historical reconstruction allowed revealing the critical lines of relativist archeology and traditional historiography. Relativist approach is averted from the dimension of concrete texts to logical anachronistic speculations over seemingly evident contextual links. Such strategy is legitimate to sustain logical descriptions of the categories exempted from the certain paradigm but it is useless to reveal factual genealogical links between the discourses of the two philosophers. Descriptive studies seem to fall prey to hermeneutic ambiguity in referring to a set of ideas forming the canon of perennial philosophy. It is proved that historiographical approach enables to objectively examine genetic relations between various corpora of philosophical texts. Nowadays the Ukrainian historico-philosophical science is going through a harsh crisis of methodology, caused by distortion of universal coordinates of scientific thinking allegedly providing the condition of the so-called methodological pluralism. Numerous discussions focus on the question about the very scientific nature of history of philosophy as a branch of knowledge. The tendency which appears to prevail in such disputes defines history of philosophy as philosophy in contrast to the opinion that history of philosophy should be rather seen as approximate to social history. (shrink)

Any deviation of speed in a traffic flow from a speed limit represents a potential risk of traffic accidents, so speed management appears as an imperative. However, an inadequately set speed limit often causes drivers’ noncompliance to it in the conditions of real traffic flow. By determining the value of exceeding the speed limit according to vehicle classes, it is possible to recommend a credible speeding value that can be considered credible up to a value above the speed limit. In (...) this paper, deterministic multistep mathematical models of speed deviation from the speed limit as a function of longitudinal gradient for the proposed vehicle classes were developed. A total of 11 measuring sections with different traffic flow types were analyzed. Based on a detailed analysis of speeding, models for the deviation of the 15th, 50th, and 85th percentiles were obtained, with the aim of adjusting the credible deviation to control measures. The results obtained in this study were compared with a survey of traffic flow speeding on two-lane roads conducted in Serbia. (shrink)

Cosmology is currently a broad and rapidly developing field of knowledge.

Ancient Buddhist philosophy, with reference to Buddhist economic philosophy.

Considerable attention has been given in recent years to the study of the methodological problems of domestic and foreign policy. Some definite results have been achieved. The essence and structure of politics, the content and specific features of its various branches and tendencies have been explored; the place of the social sciences in the study of politics has been determined; and the question of the necessity of elaborating a special theory of politics has been posed.

One of the most experimentally studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., 99% of the objects in the domain of quantification fall under it, a conclusion that clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier (...) meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment. (shrink)

: J.S. Mill declares the true liberal prays for enlightened opposition. Slavoj Žižek's anti-liberal Kierkegaardian-Leninist philosophy, as presented in On Belief, is sized up as an opponent but fails to measure up philosophically. Žižek is not clear-headed; doesn't understand Kierkegaard; doesn't understand Lenin; or is too much of a soft-hearted liberal who only wishes he weren't. Žižek fears liberalism may threaten freedom. But the threats he sees — although real — are old news to liberals. Lionel Trilling-inspired hints concerning the (...) proper care and feedings of the liberal imagination conclude the paper. (shrink)

The transition from capitalism to socialism that is taking place in our epoch confronts the science of philosophy with the problem of theoretical analysis of the dialectics of contemporary social development and of progress in science and technology. Taking into consideration the fact that the process of social change is occurring under conditions of exacerbation of the ideological struggle of the forces of socialism and capitalism, Marxist philosophers face as their most important project a deep-going, comprehensive critique of current bourgeois (...) philosophy and sociology, as well as of revisionist distortions of Marxist-Leninist theory. (shrink)

The very title of our conference, "Violence in Post-Totalitarian Society," implies the existence of certain expectations. We have always assumed that the communist regime would never fall without violence; an outburst of violence seemed a natural reaction to the demise or weakening of the system. It is extremely difficult to assess today the extent to which these fears have been borne out. Statistics are unreliable at present, and in the past they did not exist for many parameters. Hence it is (...) not always possible to compare current and previous levels of violence on the basis of statistical data. As for the widespread opinion that crime is unlimited, it is determined, like any other social attitude, by a mass of factors among which the real state of affairs does not necessarily head the list. As for the violence originating with the state, although the present regime clearly does not shrink from violence, so far the general level of coercion and cruelty is infinitely distant from that perpetrated for decades under the previous system. (shrink)

This chapter surveys a few of the so-called “easy” problems, as referred to by Chalmers, in understanding color perception. The obscurity of psycho-neural isomorphism is highlighted by the difficulties encountered in the domain of color, and while this theme has been discussed extensively, the discussion here at least provides an opportunity to review interesting facts and ideas about color vision. Trichromacy is considered first in this chapter, since it provides the most familiar example of physiological explanation in perception—an explanation generally (...) held to be straightforward, simple, and completely satisfactory. However, as is shown in the latter part of this chapter, the neural basis of trichromacy is not yet well understood. The prospects for physiological explanation of less elementary aspects of color vision are also discussed in broad terms, and the conclusions reached here are also discouraging for current theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Since the appearance of private property and the state, the attention of thinkers of many generations has been focused without interruption on questions of war and peace. Most, however, have been unable to explain these sociohistorical phenomena. A truly scientific theory of war and peace has been established only by the founders of Marxism-Leninism.