The question of the essence of contemporary socialist artistic culture is being acutely posed today, in the period of renewal of the whole life of Soviet society. To what extent does the method of socialist realism, which has become established in our theory and practice, correspond to the processes taking place within art? Is its method adequate for an all-round reflection and analysis of the entire diversity and uniqueness of today's society? After all, the method of socialist realism presumes a (...) truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development, i.e., it orients the artist toward reflecting that reality only in "forms of life" and requires him to represent only progressive processes. (shrink)

In the Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Twenty-sixth Party Congress we find emphasized the importance of the idea "that everything surrounding us shall bear the impress of beauty, of good taste" . The shaping of good taste, of esthetic taste in particular, is one of the most important conditions for the development of mental and emotional culture in our society.

One of the most important theoretical and ideological tasks of Marxist philosophy is the critical study of the philosophical thought of the West. In the second half of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the ideological struggle on the international arena entered a new stage. It was characterized by the turn of the forces of imperialist reaction away from the politics of detente to the politics of the "cold war," to the active opposition to the forces of peace, democracy, (...) and socialism. The struggle of ideas has swung back and forth in the context of, on the one hand, a resurgence of reactionary anticommunist tendencies, and the stimulation and expansion of antimilitary movements and the struggles of the peoples for peace and socialism on the other. (shrink)

The history of Marxist ethical thought, particularly in the USSR, is not only the history of research into ethical problems, but of the dissemination of ethical knowledge among the masses. Moreover, as a rule, these two currents of scientific-ideological activity developed in constant interaction with each other, so that delimitation and study of each of them separately are not always possible. Marxist-Leninist ethics, like Marxism as a whole, has never been a sphere of "pure knowledge," but was always an implement (...) of the revolutionary practice of the proletariat, resolving problems propounded by that practice, and in intimate association with it. (shrink)

In this paper I shall venture into an area with which I am not very familiar and in which I feel far from confident; namely into phenomenology. My main motive is not to get away from standard, boring, methodological questions like those of induction and demarcation; but the conviction that a phenomenological account of the empirical basis forms a necessary complement to Popper's falsificationism. According to the latter, a scientific theory is a synthetic and universal, hence unverifiable proposition. In fact, (...) in order to be technologically useful, a scientific hypothesis must refer to future states-of-affairs; it ought therefore to remain unverified. But in order to be empirical, a theory must bear some kind of relation to factual statements. According to Popper, such a relation can only be one of potential conflict. Thus a theory T will be termed scientific if and only if T is logically incompatible with a so-called basic statement b, where b is both empirically verifiable and empirically falsifiable. In other words: T is scientific if it entails ¬b; where b, hence also ¬b, is an empirically decidable proposition. (shrink)

Despite the periodic table having been discovered by chemists half a century before the discovery of electronic structure, modern designs are invariably based on physicists’ definition of periods. This table is a chemists’ table, reverting to the phenomenal periods that led to the table’s discovery. In doing so, the position of hydrogen is clarified.

The Term ‘liberty’ invokes such universal respect that most modern political economists and moralists endeavour to find a conspicuous place for it somewhere in their systems or prescriptions. But in view of the innumerable senses of this term an insistence on some kind of definition prior to any discussion seems to be justified. For our present purposes attention to two particularly conflicting interpretations will be sufficient. These are sometimes called the ‘negative’ and the ‘positive’ notions of Liberty. According to the (...) ‘negative’ notion, my own liberty implies the reduction to a minimum of the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act. Conversely the absence of liberty, or coercion, is regarded as undesirable because it amounts to the prevention by other persons of my doing what I want. On the other hand, the ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ consists in the attainment of self-mastery, or, in other words, the release from the domination of ‘adverse’ influences. This ‘slavery’ from which men ‘liberate’ themselves is variously described to include slavery to ‘nature’, to ‘unbridled passions’, to ‘irrational impulses’, or simply slavery to one's ‘lower nature’. ‘Positive’ liberty is then identified with ‘self-realisation’ or an awakening into a conscious state of rationality. The fact that it is contended that such a state can often be attained only by the interference of other ‘rational’ persons who ‘liberate’ their fellow beings from their ‘irrationality’, brings this interpretation of liberty into open and striking conflict with liberty in the ‘negative’ sense. (shrink)

This article, in the example of the subject of shukr (gratitude), proposes a ‘perspective’ for the instructor who determines the processes of bringing a subject into the learning environment. This perspective is related to the encounter with the knowledge of the subject to be taught. It points to the approach of the instructor to the information he/she will refer to about the subject he/she will teach while preparing in the mental plan. The content of the subject, the objectives, the methods, (...) techniques, and resources to be used to present the subject, and how the output will be measured and evaluated are largely determined by this perspective. In a way, the proposed perspective involves monitoring the change and transformation of life and the contextualization of religious knowledge by paying attention to the methodological functioning. Thus, the way the subject of gratitude presented in the Qur’an and hadith narrations aims to provide the teacher with a ‘perspective’ on what kind of content to prepare. This is a suggestion for the instructor to reveal that while managing the process of religiously understanding/interpreting life as it flows by, the instructor should not ignore the ways in which knowledge appears in the Qur’an and hadith narrations. For example, the first meaning of the word shukr (gratitude) in the Qur’an is “faith in Allah.” However, traditionally, shukr (gratitude) is not taught within the subject area of faith. In this context, the article follows the suggestion that referring to the method and source of the knowledge to be taught can provide the instructor with a holistic and in-depth ‘perspective.’. (shrink)

A homonymy analysis is proposed to explain the so-called “demonstrative use” of personal pronouns. This analysis explains why some pronouns (_it_) do not allow a demonstrative use, as demonstrated in Nunberg (1993). The absence of a demonstrative feature in _it_ can also account for the fact that it does not allow deferred reference. It is argued on the basis of the structure of the nominal demonstrative paradigm that the homonymy analysis is more parsimonious than a single-item analysis.