The fact that the names of two philosophers who lived and worked in such different periods, under conditions of quite dissimilar cultures and civilizations, share the title of this article is in itself enough to require clarification. Nikolai Berdiaev, who belonged to a current of Russian philosophy that called itself mystical, hardly needs to be presented to the reader. Muhyiuddin ibn-'Arabi , the greatest mystic of the Arab Middle Ages, is known as the founder of a philosophical conception that was (...) later referred to as the "unity of being" and enjoyed broad popularity among Islamic thinkers, philosophers, and poets of the late Middle Ages. Moreover, motifs of this conception are not difficult to find in the works of contemporary literati enthralled by the ideas of Islamic mysticism, i.e., of Sufism. Hence these two outstanding figures can be compared on the common ground that they belonged to the current of philosophical thought of mankind that is called mysticism or mystical philosophy. Despite all the differences that doubtlessly exist among Russian, Arabic, and, let us say, European mysticism, there are also certain fundamental common features of this way of looking at the world that enable us to bring all these currents together under a single generic concept. (shrink)

The study examines Russian philosopher Andrei Smirnov’s conception of the logic of sense as a way of providing exposition of the reasons for the Russian-Ukrainian war. The logic of sense is simultaneously a theory of rules of sense-setting and the very rules of sense-setting created by a culture and the ruling culture. Smirnov thinks that the reasons lie in the clash between common-human European culture and its logic of sense and all-human Russian culture and its logic of (...) sense. Smirnov sees no difference between Russians and Ukrainians and considers the Ukrainian culture an essential and indispensable part of Russian culture. Therefore, the expansion of the common-human European culture to Ukraine challenges the all-human Russian culture. (shrink)

The article describes the linguistic conditionalities and correlations of four civilization-specific types of rationality: (1) The Great West (BZ), the heir of the ancient civilization. (2) The Afro-Asian (AA) civilization, in its current state represented by the populous Arab-Islamic world and a more ancient version of the Jewish culture. (3) The South Asian (SA) civilization, which is originated in the central part of the northern India, which defined the cultures of Indochina (except Vietnam) and earlier Indonesia. (4) The Far Eastern (...) (DV) civilization formed in China, which spread to its neighboring countries. The author explores the correlations with the types of a developed writing based on the tiers of the linguistic structure of each of the civilizations, as well as the re­sults of the ultimate semantic-ontological transition. The only related theory belongs to Andrei Smirnov and is called the Logic-of-sense theory. Some of its results have found their application in the thoughts expressed in this paper. (shrink)

The article suggests specific grammatical features of some languages of the leading philosophical traditions of Eurasia, which can explain some of the differences in philo­sophical thinking that exist in these traditions. In particular, the use of Genetivus Objec­tivus in Sanskrit, New European, Latin and Arabic languages is considered, its possible correlation with the socio-practice of cultures in which these languages are dominant is analyzed. As a theoretical preamble, which allows not only to raise, but also to compre­hend the designated problems, (...) the author refers to the logical-semantic theory proposed by the Russian philosopher and arabist Andrei V. Smirnov (b. 1958), which deals with subject-predicate constructions in substantive and procedural logic, the problems of cor­relation of language and thinking, as well as the commensurability of the bases rationality in different philosophical cultures. Analyzing the peculiarities of the use of the so-called object genitive case (Genetivus Objectivus) in different linguistic traditions, the author comes to the conclusion that it is the grammar of a language that often determines the pe­culiarities of a person’s thinking, which in turn are reflected in the socio-practice of a par­ticular culture. Using the example of the Sanskrit fragment “Śrībhāṣya” by the Indian me­dieval philosopher Rāmānuja (XI–XII), in which the compound word (brahmajijñāsā) is proposed to be read as a combination of two nouns in the construction of Genetivus Ob­jectivus (brahmano jijñāsā) (with reference to the grammar of Pāṇini), the author of the article shows the peculiarity of Sanskrit-speaking thinking in comparison with New Euro­pean, Arabic and Latin languages. This feature is understood in the light of the defini­tions offered by philosophical traditions to understand the nature of God or the Absolute Principle. (shrink)

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Smirnov was born on March 2, 1931. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1954. From 1957 till 1961 he was a lecturer in philosophy and logic at the Tomsk University. Since 1961 his scientific activity continued in Moscow at the Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1970 and till the last days of his life V. A. Smirnov was lecturer and then Professor at the Chair of Logic at Moscow State (...) University. V. A. Smirnov played an important role at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences being the Head of Department of Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Head of Section of Logic. Last years he was the leader of the Centre of Logical Investigations of Russsian Academy of Sciences. In 1990-91 he founded a new non-goverment Institute of Logic, Cognitive Sciences and Development of Personality for performing research, teaching, editorial and organization activity in the field of humanities. At the Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University and at the Institute of Philosophy V. A. Smirnov and his close colleagues have founded a Russian logical school which brought up many talented researchers who work at several scientific centres in various countries. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 334-356, July 2022.

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

The construction of space-time in a physical system without time and dynamics is considered. It is shown that the anthropic principle and causality principle inevitably arise in models without time and dynamics. It is shown that for any physical model based on a system without time and dynamics, the anthropic principle is a scientific principle and, in principle, can be falsified. It is shown that, in principle, there is the possibility of experimental verification of what is true - realism or (...) idealism. (shrink)

Structures without time and dynamics are considered. The principle is proposed how to build space-time in a structure without time and dynamics. It is found what can be objects in such a space-time, and what can be an interaction between such objects.Within the framework of the considered class of structures, answers were found to the following problems of philosophy and physics: the nature of consciousness and the connection between the body and consciousness (mind-body problem), nature of time, anthropic principle and (...) the problem of fine-tuning the universe, the effectiveness of mathematics in describing physical phenomena, limits of knowledge.The considered class of structures makes it possible to find answers to questions that cannot be answered for our Universe. This shows the fundamental possibility of finding answers to these questions for our Universe as well. (shrink)

The builders of our new society will concentrate their primary efforts and energy on the improvement of the economic system of socialism, the growth of the productive forces, and the intensification of scientific-technological progress. To what extent it will be possible to accelerate the pace along this unbeaten path will depend on success in mobilizing the vast reserves of the socialist economy.

Meaning is not a ready-made entity found in dictionaries as signified by a language sign, but rather something which is manufactured through a sense-positing procedure that starts with an initial i...

Mainstream political liberals hold that state coercion is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Critics argue that this public justification principle is self-defeating, because it depends on moral justifications that not all may reasonably be expected to accept. To rebut the self-defeat objection, I elaborate on the following disjunction: one either agrees or disagrees that it is wrong to impose one’s morality on others by the coercive power (...) of the state. Those who disagree reject PJP, they understand politics as war. Those who agree accept PJP, they understand politics as competition. Political competitors abide by PJP to avoid politics as war, by enforcing PJP on political combatants they engage in a war that is unavoidable. In both cases their exercise of political power has a justification that is reasonably acceptable to all. (shrink)

Primatological and archaeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking one's life fighting for the group) evolved as a specialized form of altruism in response to war. We show that war selects strongly for heroism but only weakly for a domain-general altruistic propensity that promotes both heroism and other privately costly, (...) group-benefiting behaviors. A complementary analytical model shows that domain-specific heroism should evolve more readily when groups are small and mortality in defeated groups is high, features that are plausibly characteristic of our collective ancestral past. (shrink)

This collection brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work (...) available in a single volume, readers will gain both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which these interactions manifest. The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules. Together, these three key issues cover a wide range of philosophical interests in law that can be elucidated by a better understanding of language and linguistic communication. (shrink)

LetEO be the elementary ontology of Leniewski formalized as in Iwanu [1], and letLS be the monadic second-order calculus of predicates. In this paper we give an example of a recursive function , defined on the formulas of the language ofEO with values in the set of formulas of the language of LS, such that EO A iff LS (A) for each formulaA.

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

Recently I posted a paper entitled “External observer reflections on QBism”. As any external observer, I was not able to reflect all features of QBism properly. The comments I received from one of QBism’s creators, C. A. Fuchs, were very valuable to me in better understanding the views of QBists. Some of QBism’s features are very delicate and extracting them from articles of QBists is not a simple task. Therefore, I hope that the second portion of my reflections on QBism (...) might be interesting and useful for other experts in quantum foundations and quantum information theory. In the present paper I correct some of my earlier posted critical comments on QBism. At the same time, other critical comments gained new validation through my recent deeper understanding of QBists views on a number of problems. (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

Despite its frequent appearances in sociological textbooks, dictionaries and theoretical opuses, ethnomethodology is still one of the most misunderstood and undervalued domains of sociological inquiry. This is particularly evident in the case of the central sociological question: social order. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, provided a unique answer to the question of order. His answer emphasized a contingent, situated character of constitutive practices of local order production. Initially a response to Talcott Parsons’ question about the conditions of the stability (...) of social order, Garfinkel’s conception of constitutive order was later radicalized and used as the foundation of the programme of empirical ethnomethodological studies. To properly understand the radical character of the conception and programme, it is necessary to reveal the core elements of it and to separate them from the historically changed components. (shrink)

Many powers-realists assume that the powers of objects are identical with the dispositions of objects and, hence, that ‘power’ and ‘disposition’ are interchangeable. In this article, I aim to disentangle dispositions from powers with the goal of getting a better sense of how powers and dispositions relate to one another. I present and defend a modest realism about dispositions built upon a standard strong realism about powers. I argue that each correct disposition-ascription we can make of an object is made (...) true by the manifestations towards which a given power or collection of powers of the object is directed.RésuméDe nombreux réalistes des pouvoirs supposent que les pouvoirs des objets sont identiques aux dispositions des objets et, par conséquent, que le « pouvoir » et la « disposition » sont interchangeables. Dans cet article, j'ai pour objectif de démêler les dispositions des pouvoirs dans le but d'avoir une meilleure idée de la façon dont les pouvoirs et les dispositions se rapportent les uns aux autres. Je présente et défends un réalisme des dispositions modeste fondées sur un réalisme des pouvoirs standard fort. Je soutiens que chaque disposition-ascription correcte que nous pouvons faire d'un objet est rendue vraie par les manifestations vers lesquelles un pouvoir donné ou une collection de pouvoirs de l'objet est dirigé. (shrink)

This paper argues that the literal meaning of words in a natural language is less conventional than usually assumed. Conventionality is defined in terms that are relative to reasons; norms that are determined by reasons are not conventions. The paper argues that in most cases, the literal meaning of words—as it applies to their definite extension—is not conventional. Conventional variations of meaning are typically present in borderline cases, of what I call the extension-range of literal meaning. Finally, some putative and (...) one or two genuine exceptions are discussed. (shrink)

The “Mind Matters” case study presents an opportunity for students in a wide range of courses such as business ethics, organizational behavior, leadership, marketing, and strategy to recognize and contemplate the difficult planning, the ethical challenges, and the high level of creativity necessary in many business decisions when bringing a new product or service to market. Also, this case study encourages its readers to formulate solutions and provide answers for complexproblems fraught with ethical dilemmas.

The article investigates the possibility of formation of creative competencies of students within the framework of scientific personnel training. It is noted that the available training courses within the framework of general training of scientific personnel allow to prepare a specialist who is able to use existing knowledge, but such a specialist is not trained in creativity. For the formation of creative competences it is necessary to take a training course of the general theory of systems, the purpose of which (...) is to create a universal methodology of reliable representation of models of objects, based on the similarity (isomorphism) of the forms and laws of the universe. A detailed argumentation of the connection between creativity and holistic representation of being, the empirical manifestation of which is isomorphism, is given. The mechanism of knowledge translation within the framework of the mechanism of multisystem integration of human being, the mechanism of knowledge borrowing by human being from sensually comprehended forms of reality is investigated. It is stated that in order to meet the set tasks of cognition, a version of the general theory of systems, extended by the metaphysical component, is required. Further, starting from the metaphysical description of the foundations of the phenomenon of isomorphism observed in the practice of cognition, it is possible to form complete collections of patterns – typical forms, templates of objects and their relations. At present, the work on such a version of the general theory of systems is being finalized. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematics of teaching general systems theory. It emphasizes two components: the issue of positioning the training course "General Theory of Systems" in relation to other courses, as well as taking into account the specifics of the subject area of students in different specialties (directions). (shrink)

Full development of personality under socialism is ensured by the further improvement of the socialist system and the rising cultural and material levels of the Soviet people. The author demonstrates that a new, integrated approach should be taken to the problem of human health in Soviet sociopolitical strategy: the concept of human health should embrace philosophical aspects together with findings of the natural and social sciences. The author looks at the wide range of social, philosophical, and methodological issues which should (...) be taken into account in order to remove the obstacles from the road towards purposeful control of human and social health. Keywords: concept of health, socialism, health care, Marxism-Leninism, USSR, bioethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In an essential way I make use of Frege’s and Vasilev’s ideas. N. A. Vasilev distinguished two levels in a logic. The abstract logic depends on gnoeologic assumptions while the empirical part of logic depends on ontological ones. Vasilev did not change the external logic but he did change the internal one. His system can be viewed as a non-standard syllogistics based on classical propositional logic . Vasilev’s ideas become plain if we discern cleary acts of predication and acts of (...) assertion, the relation of mental contents with the way things are. The second sourse of the idea seems to Frege’s differentation of mental process and assertion, statement . As a symbol of assertion for Frege serves a vertical stroke |. A horizontal stroke following it is correlated with holding a proposition, it makes the sign determined everywhere. In the string of signs the one following the vertical stroke does not express a proposition, it describes a possible state of affairs. (shrink)