This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky's program in linguistics. This approach is thought to provide a fruitful perspective from which to investigate moral competence from computational, ontogenetic, behavioral, physiological and phylogenetic perspectives. In this article, (...) I outline a framework for UMG and describe some of the evidence that supports it. I also propose a novel computational analysis of moral intuitions and argue that future research on this topic should draw more directly on legal theory. (shrink)

The use of landscape terminology in the studies of urban memory may seem redundant against the background of the established languages of description and discursive practices of commemoration. Nevertheless, the variety of already identified landscapes and approaches to their study illustrates the heuristic potential of the concept. Firstly, the landscape itself indicates a topography, a nuclear connection with the place. Secondly, a spatial frame is set — be it a city, knowledge or some memories associated with a certain territory. Thirdly, (...) and perhaps most importantly, the landscape makes it possible to connect dissimilar elements into something whole. In the landscape, the policy of memory is surprisingly manifested — what to highlight and place in the foreground, and what is better not to notice and ignore. On the other hand, spontaneous elements associated with the personal memories of residents and urban communities rhizomatically “sprout” through such a design of memory. The article highlights elements of the memorial landscape structure: content, spatial, temporal, communicative-activity and procedural. Its features are demonstrated on the example of two small Russian cities: Inta (Komi Republic, Subpolar Urals) and Kotelnich (Kirov Region); equal in size, but differing in their duration of existence. (shrink)

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference (...) between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

Adequality, or παρισóτης (parisotēs) in the original Greek of Diophantus 1 , is a crucial step in Fermat’s method of finding maxima, minima, tangents, and solving other problems that a modern mathematician would solve using infinitesimal calculus. The method is presented in a series of short articles in Fermat’s collected works (1891, pp. 133–172). The first article, Methodus ad Disquirendam Maximam et Minimam 2 , opens with a summary of an algorithm for finding the maximum or minimum value of an (...) algebraic expression in a variable A. For convenience, we will write such an expression in modern functional notation as f (a). 3 The algorithm can be broken up into six steps in the following way:Introduce an auxiliary .. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, he provides new insights into previously ignored areas such as Russian (...) liberalism, personalism, structuralism, neo-rationalism, and culturology. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy and culture has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian philosophical thought and cultural theory, now freed from the bonds of totalitarianism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of Russian thought, but also an opportunity to rethink our own intellectual heritage. (shrink)

Although the Bcl‐2 family members and p53 are involved in the regulation of apoptosis, the status of apoptotic machinery (eg caspases) plays a major role in determining the mode and timing of cell death. If the apoptotic machinery is lost, inhibited, or intrinsically inactivated, the “death stars”, Bcl‐2 and p53, may become irrelevant to cell death. In this light, high levels of Bcl‐2 may indicate that downstream apoptotic pathways are still functional. This explains why Bcl‐2 overexpression can be a marker (...) of chemosensitivity and favorable prognosis in certain cancers and why retention of wild‐type p53 may manifest inactivation of caspases in aggressive cancers. BioEssays 23:947–953, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This article argues that the key elements of the prima facie case of harmful battery may form critical building blocks of moral cognition in both humans and nonhuman animals. By contrast, at least some of the rules and representations presupposed by familiar justifications to battery appear to be uniquely human. The article also argues that many famous thought experiments in ethics and many influential experiments in moral psychology rely on harmful battery scenarios without acknowledging this fact or considering its theoretical (...) or empirical implications. The unifying factor in all these studies is goal-directed harmful contact, inflicted without consent or justification. (shrink)

When is it immoral to take advantage of another person for one's own benefit? For some, such as Ruth Sample, John Roemer, and Will Kymlicka, the answer at least partly depends on whether what one takes advantage of is the fact that this person is, or has been, the victim of injustice. I argue, however, that whether person A wrongly exploits person B is wholly unrelated to whether A takes advantage of the fact that B is, or was, the victim (...) of injustice. I also develop a positive account regarding which personal attributes one should not exploit for personal gain. (shrink)

This article argues that combining elements of the sociological theories of Johann Arnason and Peter Wagner can contribute to an understanding of the causes of the ‘new Cold War’ on the European continent. Comparisons of today’s confrontation between Russia and the West with the original Cold War are largely misleading since the Soviet model of modernity represented a radical alternative to its liberal western version. Unlike the original Cold War, the current ideological confrontation is not connected with a clash of (...) different forms of modernity. Today’s Russia lacks a clear civilizational identity and does not follow an alternative project of modernity. The recent ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics largely draws on a specific interpretation of European modernity. (shrink)

У статті аналізуються основні концепції походження пятидесятництва. Виявлено, що в західних дослідженнях з історії п'ятидесятництва переважає історико-теологічна концепція генези руху, яка наголошує на теологічному контексті майбутнього руху, вказуючи на трансформації доктринального змісту протестантизму як на ключовий фактор для подальшого розвитку п'ятидесятництва. Важливими вважаються соціальні причини, пов'язані з расовою і гендерною емансипацією. Розпочавшись на маргінесі суспільства, п'ятидесятництво з його акцентом на суб'єктивному духовному досвіді й індивідуальному самовираженні віруючого змогло забезпечити "вищий рівень компенсації", аніж інші течії християнства. На початку XXI століття дослідники (...) наголошують на місіонерському характері п'ятидесятництва та еклезіології, яка повністю пристосована для потреб місіонерства. Здійснене істориками виявлення неамериканських джерел п'ятидесятництва дозволяє теологам краще зрозуміти джерела відкритості руху до місцевих культур. (shrink)

This article describes the fight of transnational civic networks to influence business development strategies and counter the threats to environmental and labor rights posed by the construction and exploitation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in Transcaucasia. The article starts by discussing the role of civil society in the global struggle for sustainable development. Then a brief overview of the geopolitical significance of the Transcaucasian-Caspian region in today’s oil and gas markets is presented. The case study looks at how the (...) actions of international and domestic nongovernmental organizations influenced the BTC’s main shareholder and operator company, British Petroleum, as well as host countries’ governments, to switch to more environmentally cognizant and socially responsive practices. The article discusses internationalization of civil society networks in response to the looming environmental crisis in the region, using the BTC case as an illustration. The article concludes by generalizing from this particular case study to the broader issue of transnational civic activism as a risk-mitigating factor in the world dominated by industry-related threats presented by globalization of the extractive technologies. (shrink)

One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as "share your toys" or "don't hit other children." (...) In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught. (shrink)

The article discusses Alexander Bogdanov’s path from his early philosophic work, formed under the influence of Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, and Wilhelm Ostwald and dubbed by him “empiriomonism,”...

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities and their impact on the philosophy and culture of modernity and postmodernity, focusing on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking for the humanities.

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

We prove that the positive fragment of first-order intuitionistic logic in the language with two individual variables and a single monadic predicate letter, without functional symbols, constants, and equality, is undecidable. This holds true regardless of whether we consider semantics with expanding or constant domains. We then generalise this result to intervals \ and \, where QKC is the logic of the weak law of the excluded middle and QBL and QFL are first-order counterparts of Visser’s basic and formal logics, (...) respectively. We also show that, for most “natural” first-order modal logics, the two-variable fragment with a single monadic predicate letter, without functional symbols, constants, and equality, is undecidable, regardless of whether we consider semantics with expanding or constant domains. These include all sublogics of QKTB, QGL, and QGrz—among them, QK, QT, QKB, QD, QK4, and QS4. (shrink)

During the Little Ice Age of the early modern centuries, close to a third of the globe’s population perished. Because this period serves as the most recent example of the global impacts of climate change, historians and others interested in developing conceptual and methodological tools for understanding contemporary climate change regularly look to the historiography of the Little Ice Age for direction and inspiration. This article adds to this toolkit by arguing for the place of gender and sexuality in analyses (...) of climate change, something environmental historians have seldom done. It does so through the discussion of a seemingly fantastical account of a young woman who gave birth to an elephant in the Ottoman Empire in the 1640s. Focusing on the experience of one woman, her rape by an elephant from India, the sad fate of her child, and her community’s social and economic hardships shows how individuals both experienced and interpreted the environmental calamities of the Little Ice Age as a species crisis. Her story furthermore analogizes the political fortunes of the Ottoman Empire in a moment of weakness. By connecting the literatures of environmental and natural history, women’s history and histories of sexuality, empire and science, this article centers the roles of women as prime agents of population, history, and culture. (shrink)

The Dirac δ function has solid roots in nineteenth century work in Fourier analysis and singular integrals by Cauchy and others, anticipating Dirac’s discovery by over a century, and illuminating the nature of Cauchy’s infinitesimals and his infinitesimal definition of δ.

My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. (...) Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In his 1676 text De Quadratura Arithmetica, Leibniz distinguished infinita terminata from infinita interminata. The text also deals with the notion, originating with Desargues, of the point of intersection at infinite distance for parallel lines. We examine contrasting interpretations of these notions in the context of Leibniz’s analysis of asymptotes for logarithmic curves and hyperbolas. We point out difficulties that arise due to conflating these notions of infinity. As noted by Rodríguez Hurtado et al., a significant difference exists between the (...) Cartesian model of magnitudes and Leibniz’s search for a qualitative model for studying perspective, including ideal points at infinity. We show how respecting the distinction between these notions enables a consistent interpretation thereof. (shrink)

The KCTD family includes tetramerization (T1) domain containing proteins with diverse biological effects. We identified a novel member of the KCTD family, BTBD10. A comprehensive analysis of protein‐protein interactions (PPIs) allowed us to put forth a number of testable hypotheses concerning the biological functions for individual KCTD proteins. In particular, we predict that KCTD20 participates in the AKT‐mTOR‐p70 S6k signaling cascade, KCTD5 plays a role in cytokinesis in a NEK6 and ch‐TOG‐dependent manner, KCTD10 regulates the RhoA/RhoB pathway. Developmental regulator KCTD15 (...) represses AP‐2α and contributes to energy homeostasis by suppressing early adipogenesis. TNFAIP1‐like KCTD proteins may participate in post‐replication DNA repair through PCNA ubiquitination. KCTD12 may suppress the proliferation of gastrointestinal cells through interference with GABAb signaling. KCTD9 deserves experimental attention as the only eukaryotic protein with a DNA‐like pentapeptide repeat domain. The value of manual curation of PPIs and analysis of existing high‐throughput data should not be underestimated. (shrink)

In addition to the already familiar “epistemology of concepts”, the article proposes a version of “field” epistemological research. Since the well-known approach of B. Latour is difficult to apply in domestic traditions, it is proposed to start with the most accessible – with the study of technoscientific texts, which exist in huge quantities and are widely available. It is possible to overcome the difficulties that arise when a scholar in the humanities reads technical texts, since any text, including technoscientific, has (...) rhetorical characteristics. One of the characteristics of a technoscientific text is its “objectivity”, impersonality. The article provides examples of such texts from high-level journals. It is concluded that technoscientists use positivistic language in their articles with its concepts of objectivity, accuracy and facts. The authors of the articles place themselves in an imaginary position of an “impartial spectator”. Such language does not allow scientists to develop modern intra-scientific communication, to discuss such problems of technoscience that were previously considered “external” and without understanding of which modern science cannot develop. The transformation of the positivist language into a ritualized language of “common sense” of scientists is probably connected with the general tendency toward bureaucratization of science and the influence of the state. Mass higher education plays a huge role in the transmission of rules and standards. Another possible source of standardization of simplified language of description may be the publishers of scientific journals. Technoscientists themselves, although infrequently, express concern about the current state of affairs, since they find that the serious problems that arise before them not only cannot be solved, but also cannot be clearly formulated. Epistemologists, who have their own traditions and methods of research, could, in interaction with technoscientists, help the latter understand what kind of “prose” they write and speak and in what directions the professional languages and worldviews of technoscience can be advanced. Such interactions will also help the development of epistemology itself. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie Jahrgang: 7 Heft: 1 Seiten: 199-210.