In Russia, philosophy of religion, likewise religious studies, only managed to claim their name, let alone their right for self-realisation, as late as the early 1990s. The article represents an attempt to elicit the maximum possible number of primary methodological accounts, conceptual divergences and discussions pertaining to both the domain of understanding and that of studying the phenomenon of religion and the variety of religious expression, as well as methods of establishing the actual interdisciplinary relations between religious studies and the (...) philosophy of religion, with their disciplinary scope defined, on the one hand, and contiguous scientific disciplines and worldview discourses on the other. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of parallelism of epistemic and moral virtues. The author presents the problem along with other methodological obstacles in virtue epistemology. The importance of the problem of parallelism becomes evident when we turn to the criteria of intellectual (epistemic) evaluation and to the framework of possible intellectual ethos. This problem is discussed in the paper by the example of definitions of master virtue and wisdom proposed by A.R. Karimov.

The neo-Vygotskian approach to child development is introduced to English-speaking readers. Russian followers of Vygotsky have elaborated his ideas into a theory that integrates cognitive, motivational, and social aspects of child development with an emphasis on the role of children's activity as mediated by adults in their development. This theory has become the basis for an innovative analysis of periods in child development and of the mechanism of children's transitions from one period to the next. In this book, the discussion (...) of the neo-Vygotskians' approach to child development is supported by a review of their empirical data, much of which has never before been available to English-speaking readers. The discussion is also supported by a review of recent empirical findings of Western researchers, which are highly consistent with the neo-Vygotskian analysis of child development. (shrink)

My primary concern in this article is the connection between virtue epistemology and evidentialism. This possible connection is analyzed upon, firstly, the example of the intellectual virtue of wisdom, and, secondly, the historical case – Thomas Aquinas’ approach to virtue of wisdom as an intellectual disposition (habitus). I argue that it is possible to offer such an interpretation of ‘intellectual virtue’ that aligns with the peripatetic tradition broadly understood (to which the epistemology of virtues ascends), and on the basis of (...) which an evidentialist theory of justification is offered. In the first part of the paper, I briefly present the main interpretations of virtue epistemology and evidentialism in the light of externalism/internalism debate. In the second part I discuss Aquinas’ understanding of intellectual virtue as a disposition (habitus). The main concern here are virtues of theoretical habitus – wisdom and (scientific) knowledge. I show that habitus in this case is understood in two ways: as an ability, inherent to human beings, and as objective knowledge. Thus, there are two understandings of wisdom – as a virtue and knowledge (scientia). Finally, in the concluding parts of the paper, I outline possible ways of solving presented in the first part challenges to evidentialism and internalism. (shrink)

The effects that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will have on society in the short- and long-term are inherently uncertain. For this reason, many governments are avoiding strict command and control regulations for this technology and instead rely on softer ethics-based approaches. The Russian approach to regulating AI is characterized by the prevalence of unenforceable ethical principles implemented via industry self-regulation. We analyze the emergence of the regulatory regime for AI in Russia to illustrate the limitations of this approach. The article (...) is based on 50 interviews with policymakers, representatives of AI companies, and academics in the country. The findings show that this regulatory regime was formed under the strong influence of Russian big tech companies, which saw an opportunity to avoid regulatory oversight by washing out concrete regulatory measures from the policy. This approach is part of a broader protectionist sanction-proofing strategy for the local IT sector designed by the government, which can be characterized by lifting regulatory barriers for local companies. Unenforceable ethics-based self-regulation is a _regulatory gift_ from the Russian government to the industry. This _gift_ was intentionally designed because the government thought that prioritizing local innovation over consumer protection would benefit the public. However, the _gift_ can also unintentionally undermine the public interest by providing an opportunity for _ethics washing_. (shrink)

Regulation theory offers a unique perspective on the institutional aspects of digital capitalism’s accumulation regime. However, a gap exists in examining the associated mode of regulation. Based on the analysis of AI ethics washing phenomenon, we suggest the state is delicately balancing between fueling innovation and reducing uncertainty in emerging technologies. This balance leads to a unique mode of regulation, "Fugazi regulation," characterized by vaguely defined, non-enforceable moral principles with no specific implementation mechanisms. We propose a microeconomic model that rationalizes (...) this approach and shows that it is justifiable when the government struggles to differentiate between benign and harmful technology use due to capacity constraints. The potential for private companies to adopt ethical practices under Fugazi regulation supports the government’s preference for this method. This regulation mode is particularly attractive to the government during technology’s early development stages, marked by governmental optimism and uncertainty about the technology. Implications for greenwashing are also derived from the analysis. (shrink)

Mysticism is one of the most vague concepts in religious studies. In what follows I propose to boil down mysticism to spirituality and provide an analysis of lectio divina. I will also show how we can understand spirituality and how people can produce ”spiritual knowledge’.

In our study of the development of Buddhist ideas over time, one of the major problems is the absence of the links, connecting different strata, strands or schools of the Buddhist thought. Perhaps, the most extreme example of this is the origin of the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition, a complex teaching that emerged almost “full-grown” in the _Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra_. Our knowledge of the historical antecedents of Yogācāra is very scarce and, what concerns the school Sautrāntika/Dārṣṭāntika, contradictory. The _Māyājāla-sūtra_ very likely reveals important details (...) regarding the very origin of the Yogācāra tradition and is, therefore, a long-sought- for source. _Māyājāla-sūtra_ is a _sūtra_ in the recently recovered Sanskrit _Dīrgha-āgama_. It stands out from the other _Dīrgha-āgama sūtras_ by its diction and unique compositional and doctrinal features. One of its unique features is that its core terminology, its passages and similes are used extensively in the Sautrāntika-Dārṣṭāntika-Yogācāra sources, especially in the _Yogācārabhūmi_ and the _Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra_. In the article, I summarize the _sūtra_, overview these features and show that the central message of the _sūtra_ is the so-called _darśana-mārga_, a path of seeing, which is accompanied by supramundane insight (lokottara-prajñā), which enables a Buddhist adept to directly perceive the true reality and become an _ārya_, noble person. I argue that this central idea of the _sūtra_ is textually and doctrinally (or philosophically) interwoven with the specifically Yogācāra understanding of the _darśana-mārga_. Moreover, I show that one of the main ideas of the _sūtra_, the ambivalence of the sense objects, realized at the _darśana-mārga_, is likely an antecedent of the specifically Yogācāra teaching on the possibility of the same object to cause opposite types of experience, and, as such, an antecedent of the cornerstone Yogācāra principle of _vijñaptimātratā_ (the teaching that the objects of perception are mere representations of/in the mind). Another important aspect explored in this paper is the intertextuality of the _Māyājāla-sūtra_, its parallels and the first chapters of the _Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra_, which sheds important light on the origin of the latter text. I argue that these parallels to the Yogācāra teachings are, at the very least, their earlier precedents, and, because of that the _Māyājāla-sūtra_ may be called a proto-Yogācāra _sūtra_. (shrink)

While mainstream opinions and some scholarship suggests that we need God for a sense of meaning and purpose, this article proposes an alternative thesis. By digging into the data, it demonstrates how religious contexts provide the kind of atmosphere conducive to the development of meaning and purpose. Then, it shows that neither belief in God nor church attendance are needed for a strong sense of meaning and purpose. The article highlights how non-religious societies helped their members lead meaningful lives full (...) of purpose. It ends with specific research-based strategies for reason-oriented people to develop a personal sense of meaning and purpose. (shrink)

Grounded in evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), The Blindspots Between Us reveals the most common "hidden" biases that blind us to the truth, and which lead to misunderstandings and damaged relationships. Using this guide, readers will learn to identify their own blindspots, and move beyond them for better relationships-and a better world.

The article presents the main trends in the analytical epistemology of religious belief. Their interrelations and mutual influences are shown. The author argues that epistemology of religious belief has risen as one of the possible answers to the Gettier- problems. Therefore different trends in religious epistemology are bounded not only with each other, but also with trends in general epistemology. As a result of the analysis of all major trends in epistemology of religious belief (reformed epistemology, social epistemology, virtue epistemology, (...) problem of the epistemic authority) the author concludes that the core of each trend is an attempt of defining the phenomenon of religion itself. Hence it is possible to consider epistemology of religious belief as the next step in the history of such attempts. Since finding appropriate definition of the phenomenon of religion is a special task of philosophy of religion (both in analytic and continental traditions), the author argues that epistemology of religious belief is the essential part of philosophy of religion as a scholar discipline. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two books of Vladimir Shokhin, a distinguished philosopher in Russia, on philosophy of religion and philosophical theology as one project aimed at drawing the demarcation between these two disciplines. In what follows I will present Shokhin’s project and show briefly how it fits in with the current discussion on the topic, then, draw some consequences from his position, and make some critical notes, and at the end I will briefly present some my views on the (...) problem of drawing clear lines of demarcation between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology on the basis of the following questions: what is the topic of the disciplines, what are their methods, what are their guiding lines, and who may exercise them? (shrink)

Reviewed by:Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology by Marcus PlestedKirill KarpovWisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology. By Marcus Plested. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 288. $105.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-286322-5.

We present a new method of constructing Condorcet domains from pairs of Condorcet domains of smaller sizes (concatenation + shuffle scheme). The concatenation + shuffle scheme provides maximal, connected, copious, peak-pit domains whenever the original domains have these properties. It allows to construct maximal peak-pit Condorcet domains that are larger than those obtained by the Fishburn’s alternating scheme for all $$n\ge 13$$ n ≥ 13 alternatives. For a large number n of alternatives, we get a lower bound $$2.1045^{n}$$ 2. 1045 (...) n for the cardinality of the largest peak-pit Condorcet domain and a lower bound $$2.1890^{n}$$ 2. 1890 n for the cardinality of the largest Condorcet domain, improving Fishburn’s result. We also show that all Arrow’s single-peaked domains can be constructed by concatenation + shuffle scheme starting from the trivial domain. (shrink)

The problem of creativity institutionalization at the university entails an identification and building a model of interrelated socio-epistemic structures, functionally ensuring creative activities of a heterogeneous subject of cognition in line with the university’s academic missions. The paper gives a socio-philosophical analysis of transformation of the creative-type cognitive relationship in the process of University 3.0 historical development. The author classifies the approaches to the definition of creative spaces and outlines the main provisions of the author’s concept of creativity institutionalization in (...) a modern university. It is shown that the creative function of a modern university develops under the influence of public expectations, economic conditions and new technologies that call for effective educational environments, innovative learning methods, new forms of literacy. The author distinguishes four historical stages in the University 2.0, which differ in types of creative activity of a subject of cognition with respect to learning and research: education as the comprehension of truth, conjunction of research and teaching, conjunction of research and learning, learning through scientific researches. It is shown that University 3.0 takes its origin at the end of the 20th century as a result of commercialization of scientific researches, where scientific- and socialentrepreneurial creativities are added to various types of educational and scientific-research creativity. The paper presents the approaches to conceptualization of creative spaces at the University: environment model, model of cognitive processes, complex “environment as a mode of cognition” model. The concept of generativity is a core element of the author’s model of creative space, which is applied as a social-epistemological characteristic to the processes of learning and the environment of cognition. The creative space is deemed as a cognitive-generative system that interconnects creative-type cognitive processes with the cognitively active environment. (shrink)

We investigate the applicability of Hegerfeldts arguments on Quantum nonlocality in Quantum Electrodynamics following the work of Prigogine, Pronko, Petrosky, Ordonez and Karpov. We demonstrate the appearance of nonlocal effects at the level of quantum states. We show, however that the expectation values of some observables spread causally. Therefore the measurement of the nonlocality is questionable. We investigate an approach to classical measurement and conclude that the classical measurement cannot detect the “acausal” effects of the non-locality.

Social network services such as Twitter are important venues that can be used as rich data sources to mine public opinions about various topics. In this study, we used Twitter to collect data on one of the most growing theories in education, namely Self-Regulated Learning and carry out further analysis to investigate What Twitter says about SRL? This work uses three main analysis methods, descriptive, topic modeling, and geocoding analysis. The searched and collected dataset consists of a large volume of (...) relevant SRL tweets equal to 54,070 tweets between 2011 and 2021. The descriptive analysis uncovers a growing discussion on SRL on Twitter from 2011 till 2018 and then markedly decreased till the collection day. For topic modeling, the text mining technique of Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied and revealed insights on computationally processed topics. Finally, the geocoding analysis uncovers a diverse community from all over the world, yet a higher density representation of users from the Global North was identified. Further implications are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. (...) The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy). (shrink)

Value alignment is essential for ensuring that AI systems act in ways that are consistent with human values. Existing approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback and constitutional AI, however, exhibit power asymmetries and lack transparency. These “authoritarian” approaches fail to adequately accommodate a broad array of human opinions, raising concerns about whose values are being prioritized. In response, we introduce the Dynamic Value Alignment approach, theoretically grounded in the principles of parallel constraint satisfaction, which models moral reasoning as (...) a dynamic process that balances multiple value principles. Our approach also enhances users’ moral and epistemic agency by granting users greater control over the values that influence AI behavior. As a more user-centric, transparent, and participatory framework for AI ethics, our approach not only addresses the democratic deficits inherent in current practices but also ensures that AI systems are flexibly aligned with a diverse array of human values. (shrink)

Russkai︠a︡ t︠erkovʹ i drugie statʹi -- V temnykh religioznykh luchakh.

t. 1. Igry rynka -- t. 2. Torgovet︠s︡ v Khrame.

During the German-Soviet War and in the decades that followed, the Volyn Orthodox clergy functioned under a cohesive social ghetto, which was to ensure the gradual assimilation of the social group in accordance with the needs of the totalitarian regime. In this situation, the national self-awareness of a part of the sacred priests did not fit into the coordinates of the Nazi religious and ethnic politics and, later, into the process of creation of the Soviet people. The question of national (...) identity remains relevant, and now, when it is the basis of the newest Ukrainian state-making, it has caused division in the Orthodox field. The national consciousness of the Volyn clergy in the years of war and in the era of Soviet totalitarianism never became a topic of separate study. To date, scientists have only partially addressed the problem. Although in 1960, the head of the ROC Council, V. Kuroedov, said that the remnants of religious remnants contributed to preserving the bourgeois nationalist sentiment. The compilers of the first volume of documents and materials “Martyrology of the Ukrainian Churches” Osip Zinkevich and Alexander Voronin, analyzing the national composition of the bishopric of the Russian Church in Ukraine as of 1986, hoped that in case of revival of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, the origin of some of them role. (shrink)

In his critique of empiriocriticism, V. I. Lenin also considered it necessary to characterize its relationship to religion in order to show more fully the social significance of this school, which was fashionable in its time. In contrast to those who took at face value the pretensions of Machism to present the scientific thought of the nineteenth century and who hastened to put it in place of "obsolete" materialist dialectics, V. I. Lenin unmasked the "completely reactionary character" of this essentially (...) subjective-idealistic current, which played into the hands of fideism despite the fact that E. Mach considered himself an atheist. (shrink)

The high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases demands a reliable and sensitive risk assessment technique. In order to develop a fast and label-free immunosensor for C-reactive protein, a risk factor for this condition, anti-CRP antibodies were physically adsorbed to the hydrogen -terminated surface of nanocrystalline diamond. An Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay reference technique showed that this was a suitable substrate for antibody-antigen recognition reactions. Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy was used to electronically detect CRP recognition. The specificity of the immunosensor was demonstrated by incubation (...) with CRP and plasminogen as reference molecule. A different impedance behavior was observed in real-time after CRP addition as compared to plasminogen addition: the impedance increased only during CRP incubation. Fitting the data showed that this corresponded with a decrease in capacitance of the molecular layer due to its increased thickness by specific CRP recognition. Sensitivity experiments in real-time showed a clear discrimination between 1 μM, 100 nM, and 10 nM of CRP after 10 min at 100 Hz. Since, 10 nM of CRP was still clearly distinguishable from buffer solution, our CRP-directed immunosensor prototype reaches a sensitivity that is within the physiologically relevant concentration range of this biomarker in healthy controls and CVD patients. Moreover, this prototype displayed real-time discriminating power between spiked and unspiked serum, and thus also shows its applicability in this biological matrix. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Alberti's Della pittura was the first, and in many ways the most important, of the Renaissance treatises on painting, elaborating as it does the theoretical backgrounds of the influential new art of 15th-century Florence. This edition presents the work with distinction. The translation--the first in English since 1755--is based upon the known manuscript sources, and has been provided with a helpful introduction and notes. Diagrams serve to clarify Alberti's accounts of perspective. --V. C. C.

The paperbound edition of a unique and useful volume of selections, with critical introductions, from philosophical works of Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, and Juan Luis Vives. The original appeared in 1948.--V. C. C.