On behaviour as interpreted in the philosophy of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Miskawayh, d. 1030.

The article analyzes the little-known field of philosophical studies of M. Schlick, who was traditionally considered as a scientist dealing with the problems of epistemology and philosophy of science. In the spotlight of the research is the work On meaning of Life, where the philosopher not only lays the foundation for his future work on ethics but also offers an original approach to the problem of the meaning of life, linking it with the concept of "youth". He notes that most (...) people see the meaning of life in achieving certain goals. As a result, life is filled with activities aimed at preserving existence. The only way to find meaning in life is through an activity that has a purpose and value in itself, so the meaning of life cannot be found in work since it is not an activity for its own sake. The alternative is the game inherent in youth. It fills you with joy and gives value to life. The meaning of life symbolizes youth. You can be young at any time if you consider youth as a time of play, activity and creativity. It implies the requirement to change the conventional system of upbringing and conservative ethics. In particular, he insists that it is necessary to abandon the ethics of duty and replace it with new ethics, where the virtue is serene, does not suffer from the pressure of duty and freely unfolds of its own will. It is concluded that Schlick's ethics of youth is symptomatic of the first third of the twentieth century since those times were oriented to the new man, whose universal traits were health, cheerfulness, fortitude and social activism. (shrink)

No nation can exist without its own religious cults and traditions. The practical absence of records of the presence of pagan priests in our ancestors, the bearers of knowledge, beliefs and rituals, testifies only to the careful deliberate destruction of important aspects of national history. Some pages in the history of the Eastern Slavs are simply crossed out from the chronicles and replaced by pious stories in line with Byzantine hagiography. An example in this regard is the description of the (...) baptism of Kiev under Prince Vladimir, which obviously had nothing to do with the real events. The pagan rites and traditions in the annals were changed beyond recognition and took the form of fairy tales and legends. Very interesting in this regard are the descriptions of the funeral rites related to the death of Prince Igor, which were transformed by the chronicler Nestor into the legend "On the revenge of Princess Olga Derevlyany". Even the term "priest" in ancient Slavic sources was replaced by the word "magician" or "old man". Because of all these facts, a fairly authoritative hypothesis has emerged in national historical science, according to which the Eastern Slavs did not have any "pagan priests" at all. (shrink)

LET ME BEGIN this inquiry with the simple but fundamental fact that the flow of time, or passage, as it is also known, is given in experience, that it is as indubitable an aspect of our perception of the world as the sights and sounds that come in upon us, even though it is not the peculiar property of a special sense. Consider, by way of illustration, that I am now sitting at the desk in my study. This particular event (...) was not present at any earlier time, nor will it be present shortly as I become involved in other activities. The present, as I experience it, is regularly associated with later and later events. It does not hop about capriciously from here to a later time, to a previous time, and then to a much later time, or trace out some other such indiscriminate pattern; instead I find it always in association with the next moment, and as I look backward and inward, so to speak, I find that the prior moment was present and that this next-later moment is present. Quite often this condition is expressed by means of imagery. We are asked to envision either a moving present racing along a fixed track of moments or events from earlier to later, or alternatively a fixed present through which stream a series of moments or events, first the earlier and then the later ones. One is in truth hard-pressed to find references to passage which do not employ quasi-poetical tropes and metaphors, and while these do help in some sense to say what we mean, great caution is required when handling them because of their ready tendency to draw us away from the actual phenomenon requiring explanation. (shrink)