In the academic year just past, the Expert Commission on Philosophical Disciplines of the Higher Certification Committee [VAK] processed 441 cases pertaining to the award of degrees and ranks. Of these, positive decisions were handed down in 333 cases, and negative decisions in 9 cases, while final decisions have not yet been taken on 99. Of the total number, 418 cases were examined, 114 of these for the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences and 304 for Candidate in Philosophical Sciences, (...) and final decisions were taken on 323, while 95 were referred to further expert examination. (shrink)

Is Hegel's esthetics of interest to us, people of the twentieth century? Have his ideas not retreated to nonexistence with his times? Or are those who insist upon the need to investigate Hegelian esthetics and Hegel's mode of thought as a whole beginning, unconsciously and contrary to their wills, to defend the viewpoint that, despite all the progress of natural science and technology, people continue to think after the fashion of their ancestors and that human thought is either hopelessly lagging (...) or is invariably moving in a circle? (shrink)

In the experience of building towards communism in our country we have witnessed the rising role and specific weight of art and aesthetic culture in the general system of developing a communist morale in Soviet people. A number of factors requires emphasis here:First, it is perfectly clear that, under the conditions of the building of communism, becoming a professional cannot mean confining oneself to education in one's field but presumes that the individual acquire a high general level of culture, that (...) he be capable of rapidly mastering knowledge and skills in related occupations, and that he have the ability to think and behave in a nonstereotyped fashion. (shrink)

The history of Russian esthetic thought is one of the most important components of our culture. The philosophical and theoretical significance, the civic spirit, the many-sidedness, diversity, and depth of esthetic ideas make the Russian esthetic heritage a vital and permanent value in the life of the spirit of developed socialism.

In the years since World War II, the social critic has become a rather popular figure in the West. The demand for critical theories of society is readily explainable where the contradictions of social development take the form of sharp paradoxes recognized by the broad public. It may be assumed that interest in critical concepts of society will increase. People who recognize themselves as cogs without rights in the system of bureaucratic organization of state-supported monopoly capitalism, who react acutely to (...) the threat of social catastrophes , endow such concepts with the halo of humanism if only because they often find in them their own moods, given shape and seemingly elevated to the level of general social protest. These feelings represent a concrete dissatisfaction with the present situation, and the sense that the society in which they live is in crisis. (shrink)

There are words and concepts that almost automatically trigger bitter discussions in our country. And among them are the terms in the title of this article. True, there are occasional attempts to tone down the bitterness of the disputes surrounding them by using the more ideologically "neutral" terms "personal" or "individual." But the dispute is of course not about the words but about their meaning. Let us begin by looking in the dictionary.

Two years ago, a professor at the University of California, Herbert Marcuse, an American social philosopher with traditional German training, came to be regarded as the recognized theoretician of the "New Left" movement. Marcuse's popularity compelled many writers, including ourselves , to make a careful examination specifically of the theoretical content of that teaching, which laid claim to performing the role of a critical and revolutionary theory of society. The development of a critique of the philosophical and theoretical foundations and (...) the internal contradictions of Marcuse's teachings was thus dictated by a real situation, by the actual struggle of ideas, and has perhaps still not lost its significance. Another problem, which aroused the interest of researchers even then but which had not found an answer in our article because of its specific purpose, had to do with the relationship between Marcuse's philosophical concept and the spontaneous consciousness of the "mass" participants in the real protest movement that came to be known as the "New Left" movement. (shrink)

I would like to tell you about my own road to the serious pursuit of philosophy, relying only on my own memory, although occasionally I shall check this against other testimony. These are merely the notes of a witness and participant in the events described.

A hundred years have passed since the death of a man named Karl Marx. A whole century. A century of dramatic upheavals, revolutionary turmoil, and radical changes in the destiny of humankind. A century that has overturned and swept away a multitude of philosophical conceptions, social theories, and political doctrines. A century that has seen a continuous succession of victories of Marxism and its growing influence on social development.

Not only Greek philosophers listened to prophets. René Descartes also long pondered over the familiar words of Ausonius: "What path shall I choose for myself in life?" And-what an amusing play on words-the idea of methodos entered philosophy with Descartes. The very path of his metaphysical thought was the last possible one within the confines of Aristotelian metaphysics, when, having posited certain principles of discourse, in the end they themselves are conclusively reached and the entire system becomes a manifest certainty. (...) Descartes provides a glimpse of the possibility of a new type of metaphysical reflection in which the correctness of the chosen principles is grounded in the completeness and noncontradictoriness of the system built on their basis but not confined to them. (shrink)

A hundred years have passed since publication of the first edition of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which Lenin regarded as "one of the basic works of modern socialism." Engels's interest in the remote past of mankind and Lenin's evaluation of his work were, of course, not coincidental. They may be explained by the tremendous role played by the concept of primitive history in a general materialist understanding of the universal historical process. What (...) was the nature of this very first term in the sequence of socioeconomic formations, this cornerstone of the Marxist concept of universal history? When did private property, antagonistic social classes, and state power, separate from the people, emerge, and what were they, original and permanent institutions, or historically determined institutions of human communal life? These problems are clearly of great philosophical importance. They were, and continue to be, the arena of a bitter ideological struggle, and inevitably attracted the most conscientious attention of the founders of scientific communism. (shrink)

It is customary to associate the birth of European science with the name of Thales. For example: "In the history of mankind there come moments when new forms of action or thought arise so suddenly that they produce the impression of an explosion. Such is precisely the case with the rise of science—rationalistic scientific knowledge—in Asiatic Greece, in Ionia, at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., with Thales of Miletus and his school".

My reflections will have more of an interrogative than an affirmative character. And the questions will be posed not only to others but also to myself. At the outset let me broach two questions. First, why is this work ethic needed; and second, who needs it? And at the same time I should like to translate some of the general ideological and cultural problems that have been discussed here into the language of political economy and sociology. This should, it seems (...) to me, enable us more quickly to find the common language between our emotionally colored discussions about Russia and the "Western" understanding of it. Otherwise, regardless of whether we discuss our Russian situation from a Slavophile or a Westernizing point of view, what one always gets in the final analysis is that Russia cannot be understood with the intellect. And if that is so, then why all this "intellectual noise". (shrink)

Postmodernism as a mythologem reflecting the remarkable shift that has taken place in contemporary Western culture as a whole entered the consciousness of our intelligentsia with the usual delay. This is not surprising if one bears in mind the constantly "lagging" character of our consciousness, which also colors in corresponding tones the whole of "Russian civilization," and if one believes that it is condemned to be always "catching up" and making up for lost time. Having arisen in the West as (...) a concept describing certain special characteristics of the latest architectural style that no longer fitted into the rather passé category of modernism, the concept of the postmodern was initially current, both in the West and in Russia, among people close to architecture. At that time it had not yet been able to acquire the "philosophical" subtext that is already felt in the book of Charles Jencks that came out in 1977 in Germany under the gaudy title The Language of Postmodern Architecture. (shrink)

The fundamentals of the Frankfurt school's conception of art were expounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the "critical theory of society" appeared in the form of a specific philosophy of history—the history of bourgeois enlightenment, whose sources the authors trace to ancient Greek mythology.

The transition in the discussion of activity from production-labor and industrial-technological problems to practical problems of life activity proper means that forms of life activity that were formerly unshakable are now becoming the primary object of transformations and purposeful changes: the family, kinship systems, forms of communal life, the genetic basis of man, and man himself with his various capabilities and functions.

A symposium on the subject "The Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy and Violation of Human Rights in the Capitalist World" took place in Moscow in December 1976. The symposium was conducted by the Institute of State and Law and the Learned Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Problems of Ideological Currents Abroad.

Since the appearance of private property and the state, the attention of thinkers of many generations has been focused without interruption on questions of war and peace. Most, however, have been unable to explain these sociohistorical phenomena. A truly scientific theory of war and peace has been established only by the founders of Marxism-Leninism.

The present epoch is one of transition from capitalism to socialism, within which two opposite social systems exist simultaneously. Inasmuch as one of the systems - that of capitalism - is a source of wars, and the system of socialism is the source of peace, questions pertaining to the place of military means in the struggle between the two systems, questions of the struggle between the forces of war and peace and for the cessation of wars between peoples, constitute one (...) of the most important elements in the meaning of the epoch. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution" [0 60-i godovshchine Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii] states: "The Great October opened a new epoch - that of the transition of humanity from capitalism to socialism, the epoch of struggle for liberation of people from imperialism, for cessation of wars between peoples, for overthrow of the dominance of capitalism, for socialism.". (shrink)

Considerable attention has been given in recent years to the study of the methodological problems of domestic and foreign policy. Some definite results have been achieved. The essence and structure of politics, the content and specific features of its various branches and tendencies have been explored; the place of the social sciences in the study of politics has been determined; and the question of the necessity of elaborating a special theory of politics has been posed.

The persistent struggle waged by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries for peaceful coexistence among states with differing social systems has greatly increased the authority of this humanitarian policy in the eyes of the peoples of the world. Belligerent appeals for an outright rejection of peaceful coexistence are heard less and less frequently, even among the ideologists of imperialism. They are compelled to adapt themselves to the situation and to camouflage themselves with the masks of the peacemaker. Bourgeois (...) professors of social science say they are for peace and peaceful coexistence. However, these concepts are sometimes given such a distorted interpretation that all real content evaporates. "Peaceful coexistence and the cold war," we read, for example, in the words of the British professor, Hugh Seton-Watson, "are literally the same thing." [All quotations from non-Russian sources are retranslated from the Russian.] Thus, a single sentence suffices, by an act of sophistry, to transform peaceful coexistence into a state of international tension and intensive war preparations. The ideologists of imperialism deny, in essence, the possibility of cooperation between the socialist and capitalist countries in the process of peaceful coexistence. (shrink)

Seven decades separate us from the time when the workers raised the scarlet banner of revolution on the barricades of the Krasnaia Presnia district. The December armed insurrection in Moscow was the high point of development of the first Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, which occurred in 1905-1907. Seventy years are enough to permit a comprehensive evaluation of the historic significance of the events of 1905, which exercised a lasting influence on the whole subsequent development of the world movement for liberation.

The documents of the Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU, the new Party Program, the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Congress, and the welcoming addresses of the foreign delegations revealed a broad and multi-colored panorama of contemporary world development in all its variety and contradictions.

During the half-century of its existence, the Soviet study of esthetics has achieved considerable success in developing the views of the founders of Marxism-Leninism with respect to the nature and social function of art. There is no need to list the authors and titles of the works in which the history of world thought about esthetics and the cardinal problems of esthetics have been treated from the Marxist standpoint. Suffice it to say that Soviet esthetic thought has been the first (...) to deal with such very important categories as the principle of partisanship in art, the creative method , the principles of socialist realism, the international and the national in art, and so forth. (shrink)

The aesthetic comprehension of works of art has two aspects: it sheds light on something of essential importance in the work itself and in its creator, and at the same time enriches and enhances its own problematic. For, "A work of art in which thought is alienated from itself is also part of the domain of comprehending thought; and the spirit, submitting itself to the requirements of scientific investigation, thereby clearly satisfies a need of its own most innermost nature.".

In recent years there has been rather extensive discussion in the physics literature of the possibility of transmission of material effects at speeds exceeding that of light.

In recent years the science of what is to be, futurology, has become one of the most popular branches of knowledge in the West. A fever to prognosticate, the desire to penetrate the barriers of time, to predict or at least sense the central direction of history, possesses philosophers and historians, economists and sociologists, politicians and preachers, public figures, and the heads of scientific institutions and of the largest industrial firms. In the United States, England, France, and Italy, committees to (...) study the shape of the future organization of society appear one after the other. Journals of futurology are founded. Special conferences, seminars, colloquiums and even religious meetings are convened, which produce a veritable squall of prognoses, projects both abstract and narrowly practical, spiritualist prophecies, and predictions positive and irrational. (shrink)

Changes in the productive forces and, consequently, in the economic structure of socialist society as a whole are being prepared by the current relationships of production. We refer particularly to the influence of socioeconomic processes under the conditions of the revolution in science and technology on the development of the individual as a factor in the productive forces and as subject in production relationships.

The question of a universal human nature and the universally human significance of values, first and foremost moral values—a question that, it would seem, had long ago been thoroughly scrutinized in the works of Marxist scholars, including V. P. Tugarinov—has suddenly acquired a "second wind" in public consciousness and in the journalism of our days. Well-known writers, journalists, and scholars have come together on a theoretical platform, which is summed up in a statement by D. S. Likhachev: "Morality is a (...) part of human nature. Its norms are stable and eternal. Indeed, what can be counterposed to the commandment "Thou shalt not kill'? Some new commandment? ‘Kill’? And what about the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’? or ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’?". (shrink)

Marx said that a science attains perfection when it is successful in employing mathematics.

The comparative analysis of the approaches to philosophy and philosophizing by the two prominent Russian thinkers of the Soviet era: Evald V. Ilyenkov and Merab K. Mamardashvili. The author discusses specific methodological and conceptual features of Ilyenkov's dialectic and Mamardashvili's phenomenology, showing their theoretical and topical affinity.