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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Georges Gurvitch, from the 1920s to the end of his life, was solving the problem of combining unity and plurality in the justification of society. He believed that individualism and collectivism represented social processes in a limited way because they were based on the preconception that the binding power of law derives respectively from a private or corporate actor's will. Gurvitch contrasted individual law with the social one, which was intended to overcome the opposition between individualism and collectivism. Social law (...) bases on legal sociology's assumption that social interactions as such are already legal relations. This conclusion allows Gurvitch to consider any social interaction as a source of law and to assert legal pluralism as a way of constructing society. The integrity of the latter is a condition for the mutual correlation of the multiplicity of legal regulations generated by internal social interactions into the unified structure of social law. In a holistic approach to comprehending social interactions, Gurvitch, in his Russian-language works in the migr period, uses the philosophical-legal interpretation of sobornost to describe society's integrity. In French- and English-language works from the 1930s, Gurvitch uses the term "totality," which he learned from Marcel Mauss, to describe social integrity. This article compares sobornost and totality as variants of denoting social integrity in Gurvitch's social law doctrine. The researcher determines that Gurvitch, using the concepts of sobornost and totality, interpreted society's development differently, 1) as anti-hierarchical sobornost equality, and 2) as a hierarchical inordination of totalities. Having analyzed the peculiarities of the interpretation of sobornost and totality in Gurvitch's works, the author concludes that these concepts should be considered multilingual equivalents in denoting communal unity as sources of law, which reflect changes in the interpretation of society in Gurvitch's social law doctrine. (shrink)

This volume examines the elements of formalism and decisionism in Russian legal thinking and, also, the impact of conservatism on the interplay of these elements. This combination leads to internal contradictions in theorizing about law and rights in Russian legal culture.

The article provides a consecutive bibliographic account of the most salient trends and tendencies in research in the history of philosophy in Russia over the course of the last 20–25 years. We emphasise the dynamics of the research field, which is directly related to the changes that have taken place in Russian society. The afterword contains a general periodization of research in field of the history of philosophy in Russia and describes the basic characteristics of every period under consideration.

This Essay written in memoriam of Russian Philosopher Oleg Igorevich Genisaretsky (28.02.1944 — 11.05.2022). Its main intention is to study specific features of Genisaretsky’s philosophical speech. There are two parts. In the first part is discussed Genisaretsky’s traditionalism and philosophical artistry. A concept of philosophical gesture is applied there. The concept is defined as “pointing at possible Other that could, somehow, become ours”. The second part dedicated to specificity of Genisaretsky’s speech as research of potentialities. A speech like this is (...) always framed by the concrete situation and gives a possibility to feel the plenitude of existence. (shrink)

Sport has become a significant part of the contemporary society culture. There has been developed a system of sciences dealing with sports. Philosophy figures prominently among them and it deals with aesthetic problems of sport. The problem of the aesthetic of sport is really of great importance as; first of all, it creates new fields of aesthetic activity and exerts aesthetic influence upon millions of people. Secondly, sports exert profound influence upon modern architecture, design, performing and fine arts, fashion and (...) lifestyle. Thirdly, sport has become one of important means of preservation and further development of traditions of national cultures and their aesthetic values. The development of sport is mainly determined by its aesthetic essence, therefore it is important to realize thespecific character of its content and avoid applying to it criteria of other kinds of aesthetic activity. The significance of the aesthetic aspect of sport is due to the fact that sport has contributed a lot to the development of human beings, their humanistic and aesthetic ideals, sensual image of a perfect man. The character of the contemporary society sport is complicated and controversial and therefore careful analysis of its content, of its structure and functions is necessary. (shrink)

Voluntaristic theories of political obligation claim that a citizen's moral obligation to obey his state's laws is grounded in his voluntary undertakings or agreements. Two of this view's more popular varieties are consent theories and reciprocation theories, the former grounding a citizen's political obligation in a promise and the latter grounding it in the acceptance or the receipt of the benefits of social cooperation. A common objection to these theories is that they cannot justify political obligation because the actual relationship (...) between citizens and their state is insufficiently voluntary. (shrink)

Lines 27.14–17 of the text published by Justin Stover as Apuleius, De Platone 3 are printed by him as follows: quorum [sc. animalium] inmortalia esse quae in caelo sint; idcirco illa ordine cieri et eodem semper modo et alioquin esse prudentia.Of them [sc. animals], the immortal animals are those which are in the heavens; thus they move in an ordered pattern in the same way, and in addition, they are rational.

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)

_Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology_ presents a variety of contemporary philosophic problems found in the works of prominent Russian thinkers, ranging from social and political matters and pressing cultural issues to insights into modern science and mounting global challenges.

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper, the predicate counterparts, defined both axiomatically and semantically by means of Kripke frames, of the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ and their extensions are considered. It is proved that the set of semantical consequences on Kripke frames of every logic between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGL.3}$ or between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGrz.3}$ is $\Pi ^1_1$-hard even in languages with three (sometimes, two) individual variables, two (sometimes, one) unary predicate letters, and a single (...) proposition letter. As a corollary, it is proved that infinite families of modal predicate axiomatic systems, based on the classical first-order logic and the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ are not Kripke complete. Both $\Pi ^1_1$-hardness and Kripke incompleteness results of the paper do not depend on whether the logics contain the Barcan formula. (shrink)

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

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)

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)

The contributors to this anthology represent Russian-speaking communities from eight countries of the world, located on three continents: The United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, China and Israel. Most of the authors also represent different waves of Russian emigration that took place in the last quarter of the 20th century. The book opens with an interview with one of the legendary figures of the Russian diaspora, Russian-American historian Alexander Yanov, and is followed by articles from such prominent thinkers as (...) Igor Smirnov, Anatoly Akhutin and Fr. Vladimir Zelinsky, Boris Groys and Karen Swassjan, Mikhail Epstein and Alexander Genis. Issues raised in these essays cover the whole range of modern philosophical discourse-from epistemology, ontology and philosophical anthropology, to the philosophy of culture, religion, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum sentences, and (...) formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (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)

The article presents Gogol as marking the end of a century-long phase of secularism in Russian culture, from Peter the Great to Pushkin, and as the first writer to represent the cultural phenomenon of the ‘New Middle Ages’ and renewed religious zeal, first described by Berdyaev; further, it highlights some commonalities between Gogol and Belinsky and takes Belinsky as a leading instance of ‘religious atheism’. The article goes on to consider Russian culture’s need for neutral ‘middle ground’ between its multiple (...) and extreme polarities and, in this context, highlights Sergej Averintsev’s plea for an orientation towards Aristotelianism. (shrink)