The action of social laws cannot be conceived of apart from the active role of the human subject, without the participation of the subjective factor in the historical process. This viewpoint seems to me to be the only correct one. It derives from the premise, postulated by Marxism, that people's social activity must be regarded as a mode of existence of social reality, the embodiment of the social form of movement of matter, and a mode of functioning of social laws (...) themselves. All social reality, considered as a whole, all so-called "humanized nature," preserves and reproduces itself only if it is embodied in living human activity and by means of it. For example, Marx observed that a machine taken out of the productive process ceases to be a productive force of society. He emphatically rejected the notion that the objective embodiments of the historical process could function and develop automatically, independently of people, and pointed out the dependence of their social functions on living human activity. All objective embodiments of the historical process are only intermediate links and aspects of a process in which individuals renew themselves as they renew the world created by them. (shrink)

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design decisions that we believe warrant consideration as others study cross-disciplinary research processes.

This essay develops a theory of identities, selves, and ‘the self’ that both explains the sense in which selves are narratively constituted and also explains how the self relates to a person's individual autobiographical identity and to their various social identities. I argue that identities are the contents of narratively structured representations, some of which are hosted individually and are autobiographical in form, and others of which are hosted collectively and are biographical in form. These identities, in turn, give rise (...) to selves of various sorts—true selves, autobiographical selves, public and private selves, merely possible selves, and so on—which are the characters (or presupposed subjects) that appear in our various identities. Although the theory I develop bears some obvious affinities with the view that selves are fictional characters, the two views are in fact distinct, for reasons explained at the end. (shrink)

When I agreed to lecture to-night I stipulated that I might be allowed to interpret the subject announced so as to let my treatment relate less to the subject in general than to some particular aspects which happen to have been interesting me lately. Professor Whitehead, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir James Jeans have given to the world brilliant accounts of the present position of physics in relation to mathematics and philosophy. What I have to say bears to their writings, (...) the humble relation of an example to a piece of book-work, or of an application of a theorem to the theorem itself. (shrink)

Recent results in kinematics, obtained by myself and those working with me, have convinced me that the philosophical status of physics, as it has come down to us from Renaissance days, requires reconsideration. The reason can be stated in a couple of sentences: it has been found possible to establish certain laws of physics—laws of motion, the law of gravitation, the laws known under the name of the Lorentz transformation, and some others—purely deductively, without specific assumptions, and without empirical appeals (...) save only to the empirical awareness of something we call “the passage of time.” Yet physicists have claimed ad nauseam that the ultimate sanction for “laws of nature” is observation and experiment, that this is what distinguishes physics from other branches of exact inquiry. The contrast in these two conceptions of natural law needs no emphasis. It is the purpose of this article to attempt to clarify this confused situation. (shrink)

Bhartṛhari, the famous Indian linguistic philosopher (V CE) in his ‘Vākyapadīya’ discussed different doctrines on the nature of language, tending to demonstrate, that each of the doctrines is justified in a certain context and represents a certain aspect of reality. Modern scholars usually designate Bhartṛhari’s philosophy as perspectivism, though there are also disagreements with this interpretation. E.g. G. Cardona claims that Bhartṛhari’s perspectivism is generally exaggerated, and the true teaching expressed in VP is the monistic theory of the “Pāṇini-darśana”. So, (...) the concept of Bhartṛhari's perspectivism needs to be further eleborated. In this paper two characteristic features of Bhartṛhari’s perspectivism are discussed, in order to clarify the essence of his philosophical strategy: (1) Functional attitude; (2) Relative incompleteness of every single doctrine. These features elucidate the essence of Bhartṛhari's philosophical method and provide us with the key to the problem of the balance between monistic and pluralistic tendencies in the ‘Vākyapadīya’. (shrink)

Although the equally pervasive and abstract concept of space has generated a vast body of disciplines, time, and the related idea of "becoming" (transforming, ...

The line of thought from which contemporary Social Science has come forth was occupied with problems of public policy in a way which has since become very much less prominent in the work of social scientists. The classic figures of social thought —Aristotle, Plato, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Ricardo, Hobbes and Locke, Burke, Machiavelli and Hegel—were all involved in the consideration of the fundmental problems of policy from the point of view of the man (...) who had to exercise power and to make practical decisions. Even where they themselves lived in remoteness from practical affairs the clarification of the standards for the judgment and guidance of public policy was always close to the centre of their attention. The politician's problems, reduced to fundamentals, were their problems. The problem of maintaining order through the prince's exercise of power was the point of departure of classical political philosophy; it was extended by modern liberalism to the maintenance of liberty in a framework of order. Political philosophy was regarded by those who professed it, as a means of enlightening rulers—and citizens—as to the right ends and the approximate means. The great ancestor of modern empirical social research, Sir William Petty, who regarded his task as the quantitative matter-of-fact description of what existed, viewed his problem as set by the prince's need to safeguard and maximise his power. Early economic theory accepted the same task. Even after mercantalism gave way to liberalism, economic theory was still intended to be a guide to policy. (shrink)

I would like to stress Vadim Mikhailovich's [Mezhuev's] position and clarify our conversation about culturology. It is constantly repeated that culturology is a science. It is my profound conviction that culturology is not a science. Culturology is a distinctive phenomenon of Russian culture and represents a certain intellectual movement. If one briefly surveys the history of its emergence, its philosophical origin becomes obvious. This intellectual movement consists of three levels, if one takes into account the "-logy" ending. First, the philosophical (...) level, from which in the 1970s culture began to be conceived as a special field of knowledge in our country. Then, humanistic knowledge: a great many representatives of the humanities in Russia-historians, art specialists, art critics, essayists-studied culture. Finally, there is the socioscientific tendency, which is just beginning to form in Russia and carries the internationally accepted name of social and cultural anthropology. All of us are synergistically attracted to these three tendencies, which comprise what is called culturology. The question of how these three tendencies of knowledge are correlated in the framework of the given intellectual movement is, in my view, extremely important. For quite some time now, there has been no reflection in Russia on the foundations of scientific and philosophical knowledge, but such reflection is necessary. To advance along the road of rational knowledge it is important to reflect in what cognitive space we find ourselves, what we are doing within its boundaries, and for what reason. From this point of view, neither philosophers nor representatives of the humanities or the social sciences will renounce their positions of observer. Moreover, I agree with Mezhuev that there is no single philosophy, humanistic conception, or theory of culture. Anyone who is engaged professionally in the study of cultural phenomena can choose his initial foundations. As Vadim Mezhuev correctly notes, the significance of philosophy for other types of knowledge lies in the fact that there are borderline areas of man's existence in the world. However, they are identified in different ways by different philosophies: positivism, phenomenology, classical Platonism, Aristotelianism, Kantianism, and so forth. Representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge are free to choose any metaphysics. Philosophers will continue to attend to their business in their subject area, and scientists in theirs. But it is important periodically to determine rationally when there must be close and complementary relations between the three components of this intellectual movement and when they must exist in parallel. Then questions such as who has priority and who is the guardian of truth will not arise. If the tendencies have diverged in parallel, then the representatives of each of them are occupied within their domains with questions which are irrelevant in other fields of knowledge or for other theoretical models. At the end of the twentieth century, to pose the question of scientism or antiscientism is senseless because today we know that there are different forms of rationality and that science is not the only, and is quite a narrow, form of rationality. Myth too is rational. It is expressed in categories and has a particular inner logic. We recognize myth as a rational cultural entity, because it is represented in symbolic form as an ordered sequence of judgments, as an artifact. But it differs from scientific theory. That is why it is fruitful to reflect on what forms of rationality are relevant to what levels of knowledge. I agree with Ogurtsov, who says that these forms penetrate in one way or another into every culturally institutionalized form of knowledge. Indeed, in philosophical knowledge there are elements of everyday, mythological, and scientific knowledge, but this does not negate the distinctive nature of the philosophical form of knowledge. In science there are elements of metaphysics, mythology, and everyday knowledge, but this does not cancel the particularities of the scientific form of knowledge. The same is true of the humanistic form, which is in principle irremovable from the framework of institutionalized knowledge, at least for now. I do not agree with Ogurtsov that I give the humanistic form of knowledge a negative evaluation. Humanistic knowledge begins to be significant in a period of a cognitive paradigm shift. This, we can say, is apparent today, at a time of transition from the grand style of modernism in its postmodern mode to the building of the foundations for a new whole. The point is that the humanistic form of knowledge enables us to isolate at the outset those areas of the unknown at which we arrive because of the limitations inherent in other forms of rationality. It is closest to everyday and empirical categories of knowledge and forms of ideas; hence, particularism, image syncretism, and mobility are its distinctive features. But without this humanistic level no further step is possible in either scientific or philosophical knowledge. The breakdown into these forms of knowledge- philosophical, humanistic, and scientific-may be primitive, but we have to start our reflection on the foundations of our cognitive relationship to our surroundings somewhere. The identification of the forms of knowledge makes it possible to draw the conclusion that, unlike philosophical and humanistic knowledge, socioscientific knowledge is modeled on the natural sciences. From this it becomes obvious that the distinctive features of the object of social sciences determine also the special nature of the categorial apparatus, operationalization, selection method, and information analysis. I do not insist that the model I suggest must be accepted. Other models can be constructed. But let us start with a simpler comparison of types of knowledge and later we shall differentiate them. I started from this level because in our culture such a division is apparent and generally accepted. There are the philosophical, humanistic, and scientific forms of knowledge. They are irreducible to one another, they perform entirely different functions in the knowledge of man's relationship to the environment, and express different views about how man lives in culture. I agree that philosophy is exactly existence in culture with a singling out of the limits of this existence. But representatives of humanistic and socioscientific knowledge also deal with existence in culture. What is important for the philosopher is the direction of knowledge from within to the outside; for the representative of humanistic knowledge it is the description of how he exists among a multitude of seemingly diverse and divergent artifacts and processes; and for the scientist it is the order of the philosophically and humanistically defined reality in order to control it the better. (shrink)

A Few years ago Professor Souter made the suggestion that the curious custom of beginning each page of a MS., or each column of a page, with a large letter might be of African origin. He was struck with this feature while examining a fragment, newly acquired for the British Museum, of the celebrated Codex Palatinus of the Gospels , which is supposed to give us the African text of the New Testament. In reply to the suggestion, the present writer (...) submitted a list of eighteen MSS. in which this usage is illustrated. As most of the MSS. are manifestly Italian, the African origin of the practice was shown to be untenable. Quite recently another theory has been put forward, localizing the practice within still narrower limits. According to Professor Weinberger, the use of a capital at the beginning of each page would seem to be a peculiarity of MSS. coming from Cassiodore's library at Vivarium; and he proceeded to use this feature as a touchstone for detecting Codices Vivarienses. Impressed by the unusual interest attaching to this feature, I began to assemble all the instances I had, and to look for others. I collected a list of nearly fifty items, an inspection of which showed me at once that in registering the phenomenon under discussion I had unwittingly drawn up a list of very ancient MSS. The list does not, to be sure, hold all our oldest MSS., but most of those it holds are, as will be seen, among the oldest. In other words, the use of a large letter at the beginning of each page is clearly a custom of very great antiquity. This being so, it seemed useful to interrogate these MSS. further, in order to ascertain what other practices they have of interest to palaeographers. (shrink)

Air transport is playing an increasing role in the world economy every year. This is facilitated by technological development and the latest developments in the aviation industry, globalization. This paper provides an overview of artificial neural network training methods for airfare predicting. The articles for 2017-2019 were analyzed in order to determine the model with the most accurate prediction. The researchers conducted research on open data collected by themselves and set themselves the goal of creating a model that would advise (...) a user the best time to buy a ticket when the price would be the lowest. The review of the papers by similar themes revealed that the Bagging Regression Tree model has the highest results with an accuracy of 88% and the random forest method has an accuracy of 87%. Civil aviation plays an important role in the economy of each country. Aviation is the best way to cover long distances in comfort in the shortest time. Airlines offer customers a variety of opportunities to travel both within the country and abroad. The main problem of interaction between airlines and customers is the airfare: the former want to sell more at the higher price, and the latter want to buy cheaper. Therefore, companies use their own private algorithms for dynamic pricing and constantly monitor the market situation, responsive to changes in demand and the actions of competitors. This behavior allows them to achieve a balance between the desires of airlines and customers. Scientists are trying to invent a way to predict airfare so that air travelers can buy them at the lowest price. The results of the work in this area provide general rules for the best purchase. For example, according to the article thebest day to buy a ticket by expedia.com for a domestic flight on the United States is Sunday, and the best period is 57 days before departure. This article provides an overview of the works, the authors of which compared the models of machine learning. Achievements in this area are limited to direct flights of a certain domestic market and 88% accuracy of the forecast. The Bagging Regression Tree model described in the article can be considered the best result. This trained model can make predictions based only on two parameters: the number of free cargo and the number of days left before departure and has an accuracy of 88%. (shrink)