This book review discusses the new research of the Russian philosopher and cultural study scholar Olga A. Zhukova. What is special about the Russian intellectual movement Russian Europeanism? Zhukova reconstructs the ideas of Russian Europeanism, and she evaluates the approaches of Russian thinkers to national cultural history. The author manages to introduce the reader to current discussions about the specifics of the Russian cultural and philosophical “project” and to propose new approaches for the interpretation of the intellectual and literary heritage (...) of Russia. In addition to offering a critical analysis of Zhukova’s volume, the book review presents this thought provoking monograph as a great piece of scholarly work. (shrink)

This article examines the problem of cultural–civilizational self-identification in the early philosophical–poetic works of Osip Emil’evich Mandelstam. The author argues that Mandelstam...

This article discusses the evolution of the cultural-civilizational self-identification of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poet, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the 1958 Nobel Prize la...

This article discusses Vladimir Vasil’evich Veidle, a philosopher and scholar of cultural study of the Silver Age and a brilliant expert on Alexander Pushkin’s works. The focus is on th...

This article examines the unique role of Russian intellectual and émigré Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952) in understanding “Russian communism” as a phenomenon deeply religious in nature. Trained as a historian, specializing in the history of European religiosity, medieval sects, and heresies, the young Karsavin studied the manifold ways in which religious and politics were interwoven. His experience with concrete historical–cultural research helped Karsavin, who became an active figure in Russian Orthodoxy during the First World War, to analyze the origins of (...) the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. Finding himself in exile in 1922, Karsavin continued actively developing the theme of the “religious” nature of Russian Bolshevism, believing that this was the only path to overcoming it in the future from an Orthodox Christian standpoint. (shrink)

The author clarifies the attitudes of Herzen as a Westernizer of a special kind, a consistent liberal and democrat, and a defender of the historical role of the peasant commune.

Based on considerable factual material, the author establishes Berdyaev's Moscow addresses and shows how Berdyaev's Moscow environment related to different stages of his philosophical work and public life.

This article examines the siginifcant role that Romeplayed in the life of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. The author researches the “Roman” preferences of young Turgenev, who specialized in ancient literature and philosophy in Moscow, St. Petersburgand Berlin. Special attention is paid to the circumstances of 21-years-old Turgenev’s stay in the Eternal City in February–April 1840 and his relationship with members of Khovrins’ salon in Rome, espesially with the eldest daughter of Khovrin, Alexandra Nikolaevna, in marriage Bakhmeteva, whо became later a wellknown (...) writer on religious and philosophical topics. The author substantiates the version that it was young “Sashenka” Khovrina who became the prototype of Lisa Kalitina in the novel Home of the Gentry, started in Rome at the end of 1857. The author studies the “Italian traces” in the literary work of Turgenev: in early romantic poem Steno, poem Venus of Medicis, novel On the Eve, etc. The author notes that the “civilizational” contrasts between the “North” and the “South”, abundantly scattered in the works of young Turgenev, suggest that in his work has found a kind of continuation of the tradition of the “Russian Northernship,” deriving in Russian literature from G.R. Derzhavin, N.M. Karamzin, Prince P.A. Vyazemsky. (shrink)

The article examines the views of the prominent Russian politician and publicist Vasily Vitalyevich Shulgin, whom the author considers to be the largest ideologist of the “chieftain” political subculture in Russian political culture. Following Shulgin, the author distinguishes two fundamentally different models of power: “monarchical” type of power and “chieftain” type of power. V.V. Shulgin was one of the first Russian thinkers who, after Alexander Pushkin and Sergei Solovyov, considered the “golden age” of the Russian society to be under the (...) rule of “leaders-heroes”. Shulgin explained many of the problems of Russian statehood revealed in the early 20th century by the degradation of the Russian ruling class and specifically the Romanov dynasty. Under these conditions, the national leader P.A. Stolypin, able to bring the country out of crisis by evolution, had appeared “next to the monarch,” but he has not been appreciated by Russian society and it has caused a national catastrophe. The First World War has accelerated the degradation of the Russian government. The “democratic forces” that came to power in Russia for a short time could not nominate a new “leader” from their ranks. Shulgin foresaw that “intermediate figures” like the White generals or the Red diarchy of Lenin and Trotsky would eventually give way to the autocratic rule of an all-Russian “Chief,” who would combine the ideology of the Whites and the will of the Reds. (shrink)

T opicality of the study of eurocentrism essence is caused by progressive globalization, the assertion of the systemic integrity of the world that highlites fundamentally new accent on the nature of the interaction of individual civilizations, leads to the unification of the civilizational process, its subordination to common principles and values. In philosophical and sociopolitical thought, the question of further orientations and development priorities of countries and peoples has recently become particularly acute. Analysis of the literature. We used the works (...) of the authors, who began the study of this problem: Z. Bauman, Zb. Brzezinski, U. Beck, I. Wallerstein, V. Inozemtseva, S. Kara-Murza, M. Castells, Claude Levi-Strauss, I. Osinsky, A. Panarina, A. Toynbe, F. Fukuyama, S. Huntingtonа, O. Spenglera and others, as well as the work of native scientists: Y. Afonina, V. Voronkova, A. Galchinsky, O. Gnatyuk, V. Gorbulina, L. Gubersky, O. Pakhlevskoy, Y. Pakhomova, S. Pirozhkova, M. Popovich, G. Shchekina. Purpose of the article – philosophical understanding of Eurocentrism as an ideological phenomenon and socio-political practice. The objective of the study is an analysis of the essence of the phenomenon of Eurocentrism, a description of its basic principles, a place in the life of Europe and in the world as a whole, the study of the peculiarities of the Ukrainian choice in modern conditions. The methodology of the study relies on an interdisciplinary approach, the principles of historicism and global evolutionism, the use of methods of analysis and synthesis, synergy to solve the complex problems of the dichotomy "we / they", "West-East" and their influence on the formation of a new world order. The results of the study: the article deals with the historiosophical basis of Eurocentrism, European universalism and European civilization. It reveals the methodological vulnerability and limited Western-centric interpretation and periodization of the historical process, reducing the diversity of past and future specific historical forms of its implementation to one of the possible. The idea of polycentricity, the existence of other models of social development is well grounded. In the context of new global trends of world development, each civilization is self-sufficient, distinctive in its originality and historical experience, and should develop through the self-knowledge of thenations inhabiting it and thereby fulfill its mission on the Earth. The conclusions of the study – progressive globalization and the formation of the systemic integrity of the world heighlight fundamentally new accents when it comes to the "unity of civilization", the interaction and interaction of different communities and cultures. The unity and integrity of human existence presupposes its diversity, the preservation of cultural identity and features of lifestyles, the mentality of nations and ethnic groups but not the subordination to a single model of civilizational being. (shrink)

Critics attack normative ethical stakeholder theory for failing to recognize the special moral status of shareholders that justifiesthe fiduciary duties owed to them at law by managers. Stakeholder theorists reply that there is nothing morally significant about shareholders that can underwrite those fiduciary duties. I advance an argument that seeks to demonstrate both the special moral status of shareholders in a firm and the concomitant moral inadequacy of stakeholder theory. I argue that (i) if some relations morally requirefiduciary duties, and (...) (ii) the shareholder-manager relation possesses the features that make fiduciary duties morally necessary to thoserelations, then (iii) stakeholder theory is morally lacking. (shrink)

The journal Biosemiotics was envisioned by its founding editor, Marcello Barbieri, as a major periodical for interdisciplinary papers that integrate biology and semiotics. Since 2008 the journal has published 21 issues, including special issues on crucial problems such as the semiotics of perception, origins of mind, code biology, biohermeneutics, biosemiotic analysis of information and chance. The impact factor of the journal does not fully describe the significance of this journal, because the discipline of biosemiotics is young and remains in its (...) early phase of growth. As the new editorial team of Biosemiotics, we would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Barbieri for his excellent job as an editor, and ensure the readers that we are equally committed to maintain high standards and the scientific rigor of published papers. At the end of 2014 we reorganized the editorial board of the journal based on the credential and former activity of prospective members. The cu .. (shrink)

We give reasons for the importance of old narratives, including myths, in ethical thinking about science and technology. On the example of a legend about creating artificial men we explore the side effects of having too much success and the problem of intermediate social status of bioengineered artefacts.

This essay offers a comparative analysis of the notion of trust in Hegel and Confucius. It shows that Hegel’s two senses of trust depend upon his theory of recognition and recognitive struggle. The competitive thrust of Hegel’s account of trust, it argues, introduces a series of problems that cannot be adequately resolved within his theory, since it presupposes the kinds of trusting relations—self-, intersubjective- and world-trust—that it purports to explain. This essay then turns to the Confucian notions of xin 心 (...) and li 理 to address the problems in the Hegelian account. It concludes by outlining the Confucian account’s salience for critical social theory. (shrink)

Quantum technologies can be presented to the public with or without introducing a strange trait of quantum theory responsible for their non-classical efficiency. Traditionally the message was centered on the superposition principle, while entanglement and properties such as contextuality have been gaining ground recently. A less theoretical approach is focused on simple protocols that enable technological applications. It results in a pragmatic narrative built with the help of the resource paradigm and principle-based reconstructions. I discuss the advantages and weaknesses of (...) these methods. To illustrate the importance of new metaphors beyond the Schrödinger cat, I briefly describe a non-mathematical narrative about entanglement that conveys an idea of some of its unusual properties. If quantum technologists are to succeed in building trust in their work, they ought to provoke an aesthetic perception in the public commensurable with the mathematical beauty of quantum theory experienced by the physicist. The power of the narrative method lies in its capacity to do so. (shrink)

We deal with monotone structural deductive systems in an unspecified propositional language \ . These systems fall into several overlapping classes, forming a hierarchy. Along with well-known classes of deductive systems such as those of implicative, Fregean and equivalential systems, we consider new classes of unital and weakly implicative systems. The latter class is auxiliary, while the former is central in our discussion. Our analysis of unital systems leads to the concept of Lindenbaum–Tarski algebra which, under some natural conditions, is (...) a free algebra in a variety closely related to the deductive system in focus. (shrink)

We argue that the Rawlsian social contract argument advanced for stakeholder theory by R. Edward Freeman, writing alone and with William M. Evan, fails in three main ways. First, it is true to Rawls in neither form, nor purpose, nor the level of knowledge (or ignorance) required to motivate the veil of ignorance. Second, it fails to tailor the veil of ignorance to the fairness conditions that are required to solve the moral problem that Freeman and Evan set out to (...) solve (whereas Rawls’s own use of the device surely tailors the veil of ignorance to the problem of designing a just social order). Third, the argument, considered apart from its claimed Rawlsian pedigree, fails to bolster the stakeholder theory because it fails to demonstrate the rationality of adopting the institutional rules that Freeman and Evan favor. (shrink)

Life has semiotic nature; and as life forms differ in their complexity, functionality, and adaptability, we assume that forms of semiosis also vary accordingly. Here we propose a criterion to distinguish between the primitive kind of semiosis, which we call “protosemiosis” from the advanced kind of semiosis, or “eusemiosis”. In protosemiosis, agents associate signs directly with actions without considering objects, whereas in eusemiosis, agents associate signs with objects and only then possibly with actions. Protosemiosis started from the origin of life, (...) and eusemiosis started when evolving agents acquired the ability to track and classify objects. Eusemiosis is qualitatively different from protosemiosis because it can not be reduced to a small number of specific signaling pathways. Proto-signs can be classified into proto-icons that signal via single specific interaction, proto-indexes that combine several functions, and proto-symbols that are processed by a universal subagent equipped with a set of heritable adapters. Prefix “proto” is used here to characterize signs at the protosemiotic level. Although objects are not recognized by protosemiotic agents, they can be reliably reconstructed by human observers. In summary, protosemiosis is a primitive kind of semiosis that supports “know-how” without “know-what”. Without studying protosemiosis, the biosemiotics theory would be incomplete. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper is the investigation of generalized amalgamation properties for simple theories. That is, we are trying to answer the question of when a simple theory has the property of n-dimensional amalgamation, where two-dimensional amalgamation is the Independence Theorem for simple theories. We develop the notions of strong n-simplicity and n-simplicity for 1≤n≤ω, where both “1-simple” and “strongly 1-simple” are the same as “simple”. For strong n-simplicity, we present examples of simple unstable theories in each subclass (...) and prove a characteristic property of strong n-simplicity in terms of strong n-dividing, a strengthening of the dependence relation called dividing in simple theories. We prove a strong three-dimensional amalgamation property for strongly 2-simple theories, and, under an additional assumption, a strong -dimensional amalgamation property for strongly n-simple theories. In the last section of the paper we comment on why strong n-simplicity is called strong. (shrink)

Focusing on Walter Benjamin's earliest pieces dedicated to school reform and the student movement, this article traces the basic critical approaches informing his mature thought back to his struggle to critically implement and transform the theory of concept formation and value presentation developed by his Freiburg teacher, Heinrich Rickert. It begins with an account of Rickert's work, specifically of the concept of Darstellung (presentation) and its central role in Rickert's postmetaphysical theory of historical research (which he characterizes as exclusively concerned (...) with the Kantian quid juris). It shows that Rickert develops a speculative but practical theory of value recognition, which nevertheless leaves the status of value itself undetermined. Contra Rickert, Benjamin returns to the ignored quid facti, or origin of value, and shows that a metacritical, postmetaphysical approach such as Rickert's ultimately limits possible experience rather than grounding it. This basic insight, it is argued, is the cornerstone of Benjamin's concept of critique. (shrink)

What belongs to quantum theory is no more than what is needed for its derivation. Keeping to this maxim, we record a paradigmatic shift in the foundations of quantum mechanics, where the focus has recently moved from interpreting to reconstructing quantum theory. Several historic and contemporary reconstructions are analyzed, including the work of Hardy, Rovelli, and Clifton, Bub and Halvorson. We conclude by discussing the importance of a novel concept of intentionally incomplete reconstruction.

In this paper we study generic complexity of undecidable problems. It turns out that some classical undecidable problems are, in fact, strongly undecidable, i.e., they are undecidable on every strongly generic subset of inputs. For instance, the classical Halting Problem is strongly undecidable. Moreover, we prove and analog of the Rice theorem for strongly undecidable problems, which provides plenty of examples of strongly undecidable problems. Then we show that there are natural super-undecidable problems. i.e., problem which are undecidable on every (...) generic (not only strongly generic) subset of inputs. In particular, there are finitely presented semigroups with super-undecidable word problem. To construct strongly- and super-undecidable problems we introducea method of generic amplification (an analog of the amplification in complexity theory). Finally, we construct absolutely undecidable problems, which stay undecidable on every non-negligible set of inputs. Their construction rests on generic immune sets. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the concepts of consequence and rejection, formulated as operators on a nonempty set of sentences, which may initially be unstructured. One of the issues that we pay attention to is the “cyclicity” of these concepts when they are defined one through the other. In addition, we explore this cyclicity, when the set of all sentences acquires some structure, or we can assume some structure of sentences in the sense that the operation of substitution can be (...) applied to them. (shrink)

We discuss nonmonotonic reasoning in terms of consequence relations and corresponding operators. Based on the matrix consequence that gives the monotonic case, we define a restricted matrix consequence that illustrates the nonmonotonic case. The latter is a generalization of the relation of logical friendliness introduced by D. Makinson. We prove that any restricted single matrix consequence, although it may be nonmonotonic, is always weakly monotonic and, in the case of a finite matrix, the restricted matrix consequence is very strongly finitary. (...) Further, by modifying the definition of logical friendliness relation formulated specifically in a proof-theoretic manner, we show a possibility of obtaining other reflexive nonmonotonic consequence relations, for which a limited result towards finitariness is proved. This leads to numerous questions about nonmonotonic consequence relations in the segment between the monotonic consequence relation based on intuitionistic propositional logic and logical friendliness. (shrink)

Collection of published and unpublished 48 works of Śaṅkarācārya.

Classical verse work on the Advaita philosophy and meditation.

V. 1, Catuḥsūtryantapūrṇānandīyavyākhyāsaṃhitayā Śrīgovindānandapraṇītayā Ratnaprabhayā samanvitam; v. 2, Śrīgovindānandapraṇītayā Ratnaprabhayā samanvitam.