-- vyp. 3. Pomety na knigakh o istorii, filosofii i obshchestvennoĭ mysli Rossii.

This article assesses the role of Immanuel Kant’s ideas in the historical philosophy of Gustav Shpet (1879—1937). This theme has been largely ignored by Shpet scholars who have concentrated on comparing his logical-methodological theories with the ideas of representatives of phenomenology (E. Husserl, R. Ingarden and others) and hermeneutics (F. Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, H. Lipps, H.-G. Gadamer and others). Accordingly, the authors consistently reconstruct “the sphere of conversation” within which Shpet’s concept of “historical philosophy” was formed and reveal the place (...) and role of Kant’s ideas in Shpet’s theories (with particular focus on the Plato-Kant antithesis). Among Shpet’s “interlocutors” with whom he discusses Kant and thus “ploughs” the field of historical philosophy are G. I. Chelpanov and E. Husserl, B. Bolzano and A. Trendelenburg, F. Heman and M. Frischeisen-Kohler. We have attached Shpet’s notes on Kant in the archive of his family. Shpet’s attitude to Kant was controversial (while of course largely critical) and yet he was aware that Kant was the foundation of European philosophy and that his efforts to resolve the epistemological problem merit a second, thorough examination and a retracing of the path followed by Kant. The authors show that Shpet’s notes on Kant have more than historical-philosophical relevance. They enable us to take a new look at many theoretical and cognitive problems and, even more importantly, make us rethink the fundamental tenets of philosophy and the methodology of scientific cognition. (shrink)

Russian philosophy is “a sphere of conversation” in which thought is “divined”. It is a realm of search for “universal meaning” and “cultivation” of historical reality. Such a “conversation” around the work of Dostoyevsky took place in the 1920s among philosophers (including members of the Free Philosophical Association or Volfila in its abbreviated form). The theme takes on added significance at the hands of Ya. E. Golosovker and S. L. Frank whose intellectual affinity manifests itself today in the way they (...) interpret Kantian motives in the work of Dostoyevsky. Reflecting on “the logic of imagination” Golosovker draws attention to the fact that the concrete-metaphysical method of seeing the world is not identical to the amphiboly of Kant’s reflexive concepts. He made it the central theme of his book, Dostoyevsky and Kant, immersing the philosophical component of the novel The Brothers Karamazov in the context of Kant’s antinomies. The later Frank took up the subject of Dostoyevsky’s worldview in response, as it were, to the discussion of the problem of cultural crisis at Volfila (including at meetings “In Memory of Dostoyevsky”). Following Yakov Golosovker, Andrey Bely, Aron Steinberg, Semyon Lurie and others, he continued the discussion of the crisis in its organised forms. In this context, too, Kant is a significant presence. For Frank, as for Golosovker, Dostoyevsky’s world view has a “concrete-metaphysical character”. They come to this conclusion reflecting on the problem of freedom as seen by Dostoyevsky who sought to overcome Kant’s antinomies. (shrink)

The archive of Gustav Shpet contains scattered preparatory materials for his works. Some of these handwritten rough drafts are devoted to Immanuel Kant. These jottings enable us to take a new look at possible trajectories of philosophical anthropology. The main goal of this article is to show, on the one hand, the modern relevance of Kant’s reflections on the essence of the human being and, on the other hand, the productiveness of their critical reinterpretation by Shpet. In effect, Kant’s reflections (...) give us an insight into the sources of the current anthropological crisis when “the free man”, capable of creating himself, has finally detached himself from his nature (i.e. accomplished what Kant believed to be the foundation of anthropology). Shpet’s critique enables us to outline the contours of a positive way out of today’s critical situation. To implement this task, the authors carry out a historical-philosophical analysis of Shpet’s treatment of the question of philosophical anthropology. This is a new approach both for Shpet scholarship and for the Russian philosophical tradition, an approach that opens up a new path to overcome the crisis and, what is more, a path that is ecologically significant. This gives us all the more reason to try to find the critical points of anthropologism (easy enough if we turn to Shpet’s article “The Anthropologism of Lavrov in Light of the History of Philosophy”). It also encourages us to reinterpret in an anthropological context Shpet’s reflections on the human being and humanness (see the article “Wisdom or Reason?”). The Supplement contains the first ever publication of a historical document, a letter Shpet received from the German embassy in 1924, inviting him to Königsberg for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Kant’s birth and a programm of the event with the names of speakers and the topics of their presentations. (shrink)

The authors attempt to look back on discussions of Marxist philosophy and historical materialism in this country without censoring, obfuscating, or simplifying issues in order to assess the prospects of their development. They focus on the work of a follower of Georgy Plekhanov, Lyubov Axelrod, who, in developing the concept of historical materialism, turned to Kant. Axelrod’s published works (from early articles and a dissertation on Tolstoy’s worldview, to her mature works on the history of materialism and philosophical-sociological texts on (...) literary classics) and her epistolary legacy (most notably her correspondence with Plekhanov) show that, for her, rethinking the ideas of Kant was a reference point in the “critique of criticism” directed at the epistemological reasoning of Neo-Kantians, on the one hand, and at the Russian thinkers who had embraced “idealism” on the other. This was essentially the approach adopted by scholars at the Historical Materialism Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences (headed by Vladislav Zh. Kelle) and, even more importantly, this approach is still relevant to the study of the principle of historicity in philosophy and science in Russia today. Analysing the debates between “dialecticians” (headed up by Abram M. Deborin) and “mechanicists” (with whom Axelrod is often identified), the authors hold that, in epistemological terms, her scientific-philosophical concepts of the materialist interpretation of the tradition of historicity is a kind of bridge between the pre-revolutionary tradition of “positive” philosophy on Russian soil, and Marxism as it existed in the USSR. (shrink)

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

In their “social contextual view” of emotional mimicry, authors Hess and Fischer (2022) put forward emotional mimicry as a social regulator, considering it a social act, bound to certain affiliative contexts or goals. In this commentary, we argue that the core function of mimicry is to ease predicting conspecifics’ behaviours and the environment, and that as a consequence, this often smoothens social interactions. Accordingly, we make three main points. First, we argue that there is no good reason to believe that (...) the mimicry of negative expressions is fundamentally different than the mimicry of positive or ambiguous or autonomic expressions. Second, we give examples of empirical evidence that mimicry is not always a social act. Third, we show that mimicry has primary benefits for the mimicker. As such, we will briefly summarise and elaborate on the relevant findings in these respects, and propose a comparative, multi-method and ecologically valid approach which can explain the multifaceted character of the phenomenon. (shrink)

We show that the analysis of Keisler’s order can be localized to the study of φ-types. Specifically, if is a regular ultrafilter on λ such that and M is a model whose theory is countable, then is λ+-saturated iff it realizes all φ-types of size λ.

Let T 1 , T 2 be countable first-order theories, M i ⊨ T i , and ������ any regular ultrafilter on λ ≥ $\aleph_{0}$ . A longstanding open problem of Keisler asks when T 2 is more complex than T 1 , as measured by the fact that for any such λ, ������, if the ultrapower (M 2 ) λ /������ realizes all types over sets of size ≤ λ, then so must the ultrapower (M 1 ) λ /������. (...) In this paper, building on the author's prior work [12] [13] [14], we show that the relative complexity of first-order theories in Keisler's sense is reflected in the relative graph-theoretic complexity of sequences of hypergraphs associated to formulas of the theory. After reviewing prior work on Keisler's order, we present the new construction in the context of ultrapowers, give various applications to the open question of the unstable classification, and investigate the interaction between theories and regularizing sets. We show that there is a minimum unstable theory, a minimum TP 2 theory, and that maximality is implied by the density of certain graph edges (between components arising from Szemerédi-regular decompositions) remaining bounded away from 0, 1. We also introduce and discuss flexible ultrafilters, a relevant class of regular ultrafilters which reflect the sensitivity of certain unstable (non low) theories to the sizes of regularizing sets, and prove that any ultrafilter which saturates the minimal TP 2 theory is flexible. (shrink)

The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem asks for a characterization of those lattices each of which is isomorphic to the lattice L(K) of all subquasivarieties for some quasivariety K of algebraic systems. The current status of this problem, which is still open, is discussed. Various unsolved questions that are related to the Birkhoff-Maltsev problem are also considered, including ones that stem from the theory of propositional logics.

The same research proposal was submitted to 24 district health authority (DHA) research ethics committees in different parts of the country. The objective was to obtain permission for a multi-centre research project. The study of neonatal care in different types of unit (regional, subregional and district), required that four health authorities were approached in each of six widely separated health regions in England. Data were collected and compared concerning aspects of processing, including application forms, information required, timing and decision-making. The (...) key finding was that ethics committees received and processed the applications variably, reflecting individual factors and local problems. To improve consensus and facilitate multicentre studies, standard forms and instructions are suggested and the establishment of a national committee or advisory group advocated. (shrink)

In this paper, logics are conceived as two-sorted first-order structures, and we argue that this broad definition encompasses a wide class of logics with theoretical interest as well as interest from the point of view of applications. The language, concepts and methods of model theory can thus be used to describe the relationship between logics through morphisms of structures called transfers. This leads to a formal framework for studying several properties of abstract logics and their attributes such as consequence operator, (...) syntactical structure, and internal transformations. In particular, we treat Belief Revision Systems (BRS) as our main example, defining the Wide Belief Revision Systems (WBRS''s). This generalization allows us to define BRS''s in an abstract setting for classical and non-standard logics. We also show how the concept of translation between logics can be obtained as a particular case of transfers. (shrink)

Some theorists, worried about liberalism’s potential as a foundation for public health ethics, suggest that republicanism provides a better background of justification for public health policies, interventions, etc. In this article, this suggestion is put to the test, and it is argued that (i) contemporary (civic) republicanism and liberalism are not nearly as opposed as it is sometimes suggested, and that (ii) the kind of republicanism which one leading scholar in the field, Bruce Jennings, as an alternative to liberalism, does (...) not reflect the contemporary understanding of republicanism as held by, e.g. Phillip Pettit et al. (shrink)

For a first-order formula φ(x; y) we introduce and study the characteristic sequence ⟨P n : n < ω⟩ of hypergraphs defined by P n (y₁…., y n ):= $(\exists x)\bigwedge _{i\leq n}\varphi (x;y_{i})$ . We show that combinatorial and classification theoretic properties of the characteristic sequence reflect classification theoretic properties of φ and vice versa. The main results are a characterization of NIP and of simplicity in terms of persistence of configurations in the characteristic sequence. Specifically, we show that (...) some tree properties are detected by the presence of certain combinatorial configurations in the characteristic sequence while other properties such as instability and the independence property manifest themselves in the persistence of complicated configurations under localization. (shrink)

The characteristic sequence of hypergraphs Pn:n<ω associated to a formula φ, introduced in Malliaris [5], is defined by Pn=i≤nφ. We continue the study of characteristic sequences, showing that graph-theoretic techniques, notably Szemerédi’s celebrated regularity lemma, can be naturally applied to the study of model-theoretic complexity via the characteristic sequence. Specifically, we relate classification-theoretic properties of φ and of the Pn to density between components in Szemerédi-regular decompositions of graphs in the characteristic sequence. In addition, we use Szemerédi regularity to calibrate (...) model-theoretic notions of independence by describing the depth of independence of a constellation of sets and showing that certain failures of depth imply Shelah’s strong order property SOP3; this sheds light on the interplay of independence and order in unstable theories. (shrink)

This article develops an account of the nature and limits of the state’s legislative authority that closely attends to the challenge of harmonizing Kant’s ethical and juridical theories. It clarifies some key Kantian concepts and terms, then explains the way in which the state’s three interlocking authorities – legislative, executive, and judicial – are metaphysically distinct and mutually dependent. It describes the emergence of the Kantian state and identifies the preconditions of its authority. Then it offers a metaphysical model of (...) the Kantian state and uses it to argue that the activity of juridical lawgiving is an act of the omnilateral will itself. Legislative authority is limited in the sense that it does not include the capacity to create juridical laws that are conceptually incompatible with the idea of universal external freedom. I argue that my proposed account of the legislative authority is wholly consistent with that authority’s exclusive lawgiving capacity and does not threaten the possibility of ‘distributive justice’ – the legal finality that is the sine qua non of a civil condition. (shrink)

A new interpretation of quantum theory is proposed. It coincides in a number of points with the orthodox interpretation, the main difference being that the projection of the state vector can occur without the intervention of any observer.