From the end of the XX century academic community has been extensively discussing globalization issues affecting economy, politics and culture. First and foremost there grew anticipations of an ecological disaster on a global scale associated with environmental pollution. Solution of these problems on a global scale is based on a sustainable development strategy. The sustainable development is a balance between natural environment (biosphere) and artificial environment (technosphere). Russian thinkers of the early XX century introduced a notion of noosphere. One of (...) the landmarks of sustainable developmentmust become ecosophy. Asian civilization has been developing in the spirit of ecosophy. It shows that one can live in equilibrium with natural surroundings and scientific progress, preserving spiritual culture and maintaining high spiritual standard. Extending of culture dialogue became more essential in XXI century. (shrink)

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are widely believed to possess considerable socialization strengths. However, the findings on social cognition capabilities are controversial. In the present study, we investigated whether individuals with DS exhibit shortage in face tuning, one of the indispensable components of social cognition. For this purpose, we implemented a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm with food-plate images composed of food ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. The key benefit of such ‘face like non-face’ images is that single elements do (...) not facilitate face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, 25 children with DS aged 9 to 18 years were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The set of images was administered in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. In DS individuals, thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face were drastically higher as compared not only with typically developing controls, but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and Williams-Beuren syndrome. This outcome represents a significant step towards better conceptualization of visual social world in DS and neurodevelopmental disorders in general. (shrink)

This paper examines the efforts of two young Russian chemists during the late 1850s and early 1860s to establish a professional chemistry journal and a public laboratory for chemistry research in Russia. These two, N. N. Sokolov and A. N. Engel' gardt, were important participants in the early efforts to institutionalize and professionalize chemistry in Russia. However, both the chemistry laboratory and the chemistry journal ended after only a few years. The chemistry journal was curtailed not because of Government (...) interference, as is sometimes asserted, but because of a conflict over editorial policy and independence. The chemistry laboratory was closed and the equipment donated to St Petersburg University when Sokolov was appointed to the position of adjunct there. (shrink)

Multidimensional scaling of subjective color differences has shown that color stimuli are located on a hypersphere in four-dimensional space. The semantic space of color names is isomorphic with perceptual color space. A spherical four-dimensional space revealed in monkeys and fish suggests the primacy of common neuronal basis.

The paper investigates the video game discourse of the Russian state media from 2011 to 2015. Critical discourse analysis serves as a methodological framework for this work, and Foucault’s power/knowledge model is used to explain the logic behind the «grotesque discourses». In the Russian press, video games are described as an instance of inculcation, provoking overintense emotions and forcing individuals to commit symbolic acts impossible from the standpoint of “normal” pedagogy. The paper problematizes the mythologization of violence in video games (...) and identifies the main tropes used to establish the connection between video games and violence (murders) as “natural” and “obvious”. Particular attention is paid to the publications of Aleksandr Minkin, a reporter at “Moskovskij Komsomolets” (“Moscow Komsomol Member”) and one of the most prominent critics of video games, as well as to the media coverage of the first school shooting in Russia (shooting at school № 263 in 2014). It is shown that video games are used in the media discourse as an explanatory principle that allows a shift from the crime to the criminal, to those acts which reveal moral depravity or psychological disorder, and those circumstances which foster criminalism. Pointing to the games helps restore the “normal” connection between social and moral qualities, explaining the crime committed by an honours student from a “good family” as being the result of the depictions of violence in video games affecting the child’s psyche. Video games are also described as a factor in shaping the “digital generation” or “generation of gamers” — odd and politically dangerous. The dangers that games create for both gamers and society in general (the non-distinction between the “real” and the “virtual”, the illusion of a “possible restart”) allow the journalists and experts to insist on strengthening measures of supervision and protection, and expanding legal and medical control. (shrink)

This article aims to present regret, an emotion to which sociologists so far have paid little attention, as having great sociological significance. First, it reviews recent research in social psychology and economics which cast anticipated regret as playing a major role in human decision-making. Second, it suggests a regret-based interpretation of the sunk-cost fallacy. Such an interpretation points to the need of a specifically sociological perspective on regret, calling attention to the cultural and institutional framings of regret-arousing events. The article (...) further argues that secular changes in the types of regret imposed on individuals are paralleled by the spread of various forms of coping with it and that anticipated regret is responsible for both commitment to a chosen life-course and for sudden changes in it. The article ends with discussing the relationship between instrumental and moral regret, as well as the general implications of regret as a phenomenon for sociological understanding of rationality and human action. (shrink)

Luce and Narens (Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 29:1–72, 1985) showed that rank-dependent utility (RDU) is the most general interval scale utility model for binary lotteries. It can be easily established that this result cannot be generalized to lotteries with more than two outcomes. This article suggests several additional conditions to ensure RDU as the only utility model with the desired property of interval scalability in the general case. The related axiomatizations of some special cases of RDU of independent interest (the (...) quantile utility, expected utility, and Yaari’s dual expected utility) are also given. (shrink)

Издание сдержит: Специфика изучения научного и философского наследия Е. И. Рериха и Н. К. Рериха. Духовная революция в России и космическое мышление; Дух как объективная реальность и познавательная сила и др.

The depiction of pictures as specified points in a functional space is achieved by vector encoding. Picture-selective neurons are added to the declarative memory in the process of learning. New neurons are recruited from stem cells through their proliferation and differentiation. Electrical stimulation of the temporo-parietal cortex produces subjective scenes of the past similar to imagery.

One of the most persistent and popular bourgeois myths about Spinoza is that of his unwillingness to participate in any kind of political struggle whatever. This myth is sustained particularly by those non-Marxist historians of philosophy who contend that the essence of Spinozism is the development of a new form of religiosity, free of the limitations of any national religion. Such a conception of the Dutch thinker is partially based on facts related by his first biographers, particularly Lucas. As we (...) know, Lucas, in his Life of Benedict Spinoza, written in French between 1678 and 1688, writes that the philosopher's father, Michael de Spinoza, lacking funds and being unable to establish his son in commerce, chose for him the career of a rabbi, and with this in mind placed the young Spinoza in the Amsterdam kheder, where he gained an excellent knowledge of classical Hebrew and studied to perfection the Old Testament and the considerably more voluminous Talmud. Even during his period of instruction, Spinoza, having found many contradictions in the Bible and Talmud, placed the rabbis who were his teachers in untenable positions and this subsequently led to a conflict between him and the leadership of the Amsterdam Jewish community. This report by Spinoza's first biographer suggests the idea that the young Spinoza had crystallized his ideas as early as his stay in the kheder. This we find stated in many of the non-Marxist studies devoted to him. Soviet writings on Spinoza also usually repeat Lucas' view entirely without criticism . However, certain foreign researches of recent decades, which have given consideration to documents and firsthand reports published in 1932 by the Dutch researcher Vaz Dias and, more recently, certain other documents have necessitated considerable corrections in the biographies both by Lucas and Colerus. In these works — of which the book by the French researcher Madeleine Francés, Spinoza dans les pays Neerlandais de la seconde moitié du XVII siècle, Vol. I, Paris, 1937, and that of the American researcher, Lewis Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, Boston, 1958, are particularly worthy of mention — serious attempts are made to demonstrate the social roots and essence of Spinozism. The biographical data presented in these works contribute to a clarification of the real reasons for the conflict between the young Spinoza and the leadership of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. According to these writers, Spinoza's father was a wealthy man and, in all probability, did not intend to make a rabbi of his son. There can be no question that the young Spinoza attended the elementary classes of the Jewish school, but his name is not found in the lists of students in its higher grades, from which future rabbis emerged. Beginning approximately at the age of thirteen, Bento helped his father in his commercial and financial operations. However, after his father's death, Baruch himself took charge of these matters during the period 1654-1656 and, as these documents suggest, demonstrated considerable skill in commercial and financial affairs. However, the activities of merchant and financier did not appeal to the young man. The discrepancy between his intellectual interests and the nature of his occupation proved so irreconcilable that the future philosopher, who had established numerous scholarly and personal ties outside the Jewish community, drifted farther and farther both from his business and the community, until finally he was excommunicated, and broke with the community. (shrink)

The breadth and ambiguity of philosophical concepts opens the door to the most diverse interpretations of these concepts and their manifold relations. Often the ideological use of philosophical concepts and ideas descends to the level of everyday meanings in which vagueness and even primitivism become a regular phenomenon of spiritual everyday life. The basic task of professional philosophers is to define clearly the subject of their science. This task is, of course, very difficult, as is evident from the multitude of (...) different definitions of philosophy that have been offered by its many creators and, especially, by its lovers. Without claiming complete originality, the author of this article offers his understanding of this extremely important question. Further, the author considers it an elementary point to seek the answer in the two-thousand-year history of philosophy, which has developed its defining concepts and terms. On the other hand, a reliance on the principal facts of contemporary scientific knowledge of human evolution and our civilization is no less widespread. Thus, a retrospective view of the subject of philosophy through its history coincides with a prospective approach. (shrink)