This article shows that important questions remain to be answered about the topics the sophists studied and taught, and their views, both positive and negative, about truth, religion, and convention. The sophists are united more by common methods and attitudes than by common interests. All sophists, for example, challenged traditional thinking, often in ways that went far beyond questioning the existence of the gods, or the truth of traditional myths, or customary moral rules, all of which had been questioned before. (...) Gorgias, for example argued that nothing exists; Protagoras found fault with Homer's Greek; and Antiphon presented arguments for the innocence of someone who seems obviously guilty. In challenging traditional views, the sophists liked to use deliberately provocative, sometimes paradoxical arguments that seem aimed at capturing the audience's attention rather than enlightening them. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the process of many aspects of audiovisual creativity that must be taken into account when creating a video. The object of the work is to create a movie trailer through the use of design elements and graphics in the video sequence. The study examines the trailer of a post-apocalyptic fantasy genre called "Genesis", in which the two main characters are depicted as opposites. The work examines and describes in detail all the stages of creating (...) a video trailer for the film, including visual representation, audio accompaniment of the video sequence. The paper notes that the main goal of all the stages of trailer development considered in the article is to create an audiovisual project of professional quality. The main methods used in the study are visual effects modeling and 3D modeling in Houdini, creating realistic matte paintings in Photoshop and video compositing in Nuke. The main conclusions of the study are those specialized programs that allow you to create a high-quality author's product. This software will become the core of the project, since it is in it that all the elements will be combined into one final clip due to the high-quality integration of various objects of the scene. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that within the framework of the work, the characteristics of the possibilities of working with various video editors and graphic programs were carried out, which together help the creators of movie trailers and other similar products to realize the tasks of entertainment and quality of the projects produced. (shrink)

This article examines the history of denominationalism - the division of Protestantism into a multitude of independent religious associations, freely competing with each other. This approach to typologising religious associations, initially adopted for Protestant communities within the United States, has become a global phenomenon. Since the early 1980s, there has been a vigorous debate in the sociology of religion about the contemporary meaning of denominations. There is a growing number of independent churches that do not wish to be associated with (...) any of the Protestant denominations; megachurches are leaving denominations or trying not to emphasise their affiliation with any particular denomination; some megachurches and church organisations are growing into a transdenominational evangelical movement with worldwide influence. The article is based on an analysis of the work of sociologists of religion on the issue of denominationalism in Protestant organizations, ranging from Richard Niebuhr to researchers drawing on contemporary statistical data. The existing congregations that emphasize their denominational identity, none of them exist in a denominational isolated cocoon any more - worship practices and music, missional objectives and educational resources can be adopted from other non-denominational churches and trans-denominational evangelical movements. The very concepts of megachurch, independent church, and evangelical movement can be viewed as separate denominations. Using these terms, members of a congregation identify themselves as holding certain beliefs and engaging in certain practices in common with others around the world. The trend toward the emergence of independent churches is part of the new course of Protestantism - post-denominational Protestantism. (shrink)

The semiosphere is arguably the most influential concept developed by Juri Lotman, which has been reinterpreted in a variety of ways. This paper returns to Lotman’s original “anthropocentric” understanding of semiosphere as a collective intellect/consciousness and revisits the main arguments of Lotman’s discussion of human vs. nonhuman semiosis in order to position it in the modern context of cognitive semiotics and the question of human uniqueness in particular. In contrast to the majority of works that focus on symbolic consciousness and (...) multimodal communication as specifically human traits, Lotman accentuates polyglottism and dialogicity as the unique features of human culture. Formulated in this manner, the concept of semiosphere is used as a conceptual framework for the study of human cognition as well as human cognitive evolution. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify early and recent Pentecostal studies in the West and to highlight the main difference between them. Today there are more than 250 million Pentecostals in the world, and together with the charismatic movement there are more than 500 million. Having begun to spread in the 20th century, the movement claims to be the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history. In attempts to interpret the phenomenon of the movement's growth, there have been (...) several gradually emerging approaches: explaining the origin of the movement as supernaturally "coming from heaven"; searching for the origins of Pentecostalism in other Christian movements; presenting the emergence of the movement as the result of social and psychological factors such as poverty, marginalization, and the desire to escape from modern society; and the multicultural approach. The paper analyzes the works of Western historians and theologians of Pentecostalism since the second half of the 20th century. The result shows a turning point between early and late studies, namely that late studies aim to revise the history and include participants in the movement around the world, not just in North America, explore the contribution to the development of the movement of local ministers who have long remained in the shadow of Western missionaries, emphasize the diversity of ideologies and social influences that have shaped the movement. It also highlights three major contemporary areas of research: historical, characterized by studies of Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; theological, focusing on the development and shaping of theoretical theology as a result of the movement's institutionalization; and religious studies, practiced primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion. (shrink)

The article examines some aspects of Brentano's ontology, starting with his 1862 dissertation "On the ambiguity of Being according to Aristotle", as well as its influence on the philosophy of M. Heidegger. The author shows that the ontology of the early Brentano is not limited to ousiology, since it includes a discussion of the field of mental being (ens rationis, ὂν ὡς ἀληθές) and it is in this aspect that he influences the young Heidegger. Following Aristotle, Brentano assigns a central (...) role to the ontology of essence, which in the late period leads him to the position of reism, but in the lectures of the middle period Brentano discusses the problems of intentional inexistence, thanks to which projects of "new types of ontology" by Husserl and Mainong appear. The author believes that Heidegger was also influenced by these ideas. Of course, there are fundamental differences between the positions of Brentano and Heidegger, but the similarities are quite large. In particular, if Brentano, highlighting the real and true areas, gives preference in favor of the former, then Heidegger's ontology is built on the second member of this opposition. In particular, everything that can be given is called being by Heidegger, because we are talking about intentional being, about ens rationis, or ὂν ὡς ἀληθές. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of the demarcation of social sciences from social philosophy. The author proposes to model the relations between these two disciplines as a continuum instead of binary opposition - a continuum in which certain authors and concepts are located depending on the nature of their statements and the amount of empirical data involved. To illustrate a number of this continuum’s positions and features, the concept of the sacred is brought: emerging in Modern history as (...) a cultural idea, in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the works of French sociologists it becomes an empirical model that describes both the effect of social solidarity and the particular forms of religious existence. However, later, in the College of Sociology and in the works of such thinkers as G. Bataille, R. Caillois, etc., the concept acquires value meanings and becomes socio-philosophical. The absence of a clear boundary between the two statement formats, it makes possible both the “drifting” from one to another over time and the ambiguity of any critics of social science from social philosophy’s position and vice versa. At the same time, the historical “load” of the concept could be discarded in order to use it within the framework of “pure” social science or philosophy. (shrink)

"Gagarin demonstrates persuasively that Antiphon the logographer is identical with the Antiphon who made intellectual contributions on more abstract topics." —Mervin R. Dilts, Professor of Classics, New York University Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. (...) Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day? Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato. (shrink)

This article examines the innovations introduced to phenomenological philosophy by the Russian philosopher Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. We identify the motifs and results of Shpet's problematization of the Husserlian concept of constitution, and we develop Shpet's treatment of the source of semantic genesis as a generative experience.

The article deals with Heidegger’s interpretation of antique ontology, in which Being was conceptualized in terms of production. What is this interpretation and why is it so important? Until recently, it has been difficult to answer these questions, since the texts in question have only in recent years become publicly available, and therefore have not yet been fully absorbed in Heideggerian-studies. Consequently, even the very useful works that cover the subject of production-theme in Heidegger focus more on the question of (...) technique and do not consider the formation of this problematic, and therefore do not deal with it substantively. In the years 1921-1924, Heidegger was closely involved with Aristotle and lectured on his favorite philosopher for four years. It was during this period that he began to interpret Being in Aristotle as being-made, being-produced (das Hergestelltsein), and then extended this interpretation to the whole of ancient and medieval philosophy. This is a very remarkable moment in terms of methodology that characterizes Heidegger as a historian of philosophy. In this article, the author examines Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient ontology, revealing its weaknesses. (shrink)

This edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes works by more than thirty authors. There is a particular emphasis on the sophists, with the inclusion of all of their significant surviving texts, and the works of Alcidamas, Antisthenes and the 'Old Oligarch' are also represented. In addition there are excerpts from early poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Solon, the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, medical writers and presocratic philosophers. (...) Besides political theory, areas represented include early anthropology, sociology, ethics and rhetoric, and the wide range of issues discussed includes human nature, the origin of human society, the origin of law, the nature of justice, the forms of good government, the distribution of wealth, and the distribution of power among genders and social classes. (shrink)

RESUMO Absurdo e falta de sentido são geralmente estudados como categorias filosóficas e/ou lógicas. Este artigo examina o absurdo como um fenômeno semiótico e como parte dos mecanismos de geração de significado. Argumenta que o problema do absurdo e do significado como um todo é, acima de tudo, um problema textual. Esta abordagem se fundamenta no legado do semioticista e estudioso da literatura Iúri Lótman, especialmente em seus conceitos de explosão e nas noções de “não-texto” e “menos- dispositivo”. O conceito (...) de absurdo destaca o inerente paradoxo informacional da cultura humana e de seus sistemas de comunicação, nos quais ruído, erros e contratempos não impedem a comunicação, pelo contrário, estimulam-na. Em uma escala maior, o exemplo de como as culturas humanas lidam com o “não-sentido” na comunicação tem implicações para o estudo da evolução da cultura e da linguagem humanas e também traz luz adicional ao problema metodológico da relação texto/signo. ABSTRACT Absurdity and nonsense are usually studied as philosophical and/or logical categories. This paper examines nonsense as a semiotic phenomenon and as part of the mechanisms of meaning generation, and argues that the problem of nonsense and meaning as a whole is foremost a textual problem. This approach is based on the legacy of the semiotician and literary scholar Iurii Lotman, and especially his concepts of explosion and the notions of “non-text” and “minus-device.” The concept of nonsense thus highlights the inherent informational paradox of human culture and human communication systems, in which noise, errors and mishaps do not impede communication but on the contrary, stimulate it. On a larger scale the example of how human cultures deal with ‘non-sense’ in communication has implications for the study of the evolution of human culture and language and also draws additional light to the methodological problem of the text/sign relation. (shrink)

The works, views and ideas of Heini Hediger (1908-1992), one of the most distinguished and influential zoologist of the 20th century, had and still have an enormous impact on contemporary understanding of animal behaviour. His views on territorial, social, etc. aspects of animal behaviour are based on semiotic concepts derived from Umwelt-theory (J. v. Uexküll) and combined with ideas from modern ethology. Hediger's special attention was devoted to the area of animal-man communications; he treated these problematic phenomena as a system (...) of semiosis-processes, in a mainly holistic way. Hediger's approach inspires the author to propose a notion "the need for impression" to be used in zoosemiotic analyses. (shrink)

The works, views and ideas of Heini Hediger (1908-1992), one of the most distinguished and influential zoologist of the 20th century, had and still have an enormous impact on contemporary understanding of animal behaviour. His views on territorial, social, etc. aspects of animal behaviour are based on semiotic concepts derived from Umwelt-theory (J. v. Uexküll) and combined with ideas from modern ethology. Hediger's special attention was devoted to the area of animal-man communications; he treated these problematic phenomena as a system (...) of semiosis-processes, in a mainly holistic way. Hediger's approach inspires the author to propose a notion "the need for impression" to be used in zoosemiotic analyses. (shrink)

The main feature of the signs of health in the animal habitus and behaviour can be characterised as the readiness to adequately (for a species) serve the need for impression (in animalistic elements of the Umwelt). The signs of disease, however multifarious and diverse, generally display certain lack of Umwelt-oriented attentiveness, alertness. Attention of deeply afflicted animals is strongly Innenwelt-oriented; and in some species a set of such signs, suggesting sickness or mortal disease is used as a set of traits (...) in the mimicry of dying. The semiotic factors in health-disease relationships are apparently connected with intuition — like responses creating in the semiosphere a structure of Umwelt-Innenwelt polarized tensions, important in ecological and evolutional developments. (shrink)

It was shown in [3] (see also [5]) that there is a duality between the category of bounded distributive lattices endowed with a join-homomorphism and the category of Priestley spaces endowed with a Priestley relation. In this paper, bounded distributive lattices endowed with a join-homomorphism, are considered as algebras and we characterize the congruences of these algebras in terms of the mentioned duality and certain closed subsets of Priestley spaces. This enable us to characterize the simple and subdirectly irreducible algebras. (...) In particular, Priestley relations enable us to characterize the congruence lattice of the Q-distributive lattices considered in [4]. Moreover, these results give us an effective method to characterize the simple and subdirectly irreducible monadic De Morgan algebras [7].The duality considered in [4], was obtained in terms of the range of the quantifiers, and such a duality was enough to obtain the simple and subdirectly irreducible algebras, but not to characterize the congruences. (shrink)

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This method, however, suffers from well-known limitations related to the practice of authorship. Moreover, it does not perform well on those fields where multi-authored publications are rare. In this study, a new method (...) for mapping the social structure of research fields is advanced, based on the analysis of the acknowledgments of academic publications. We first discuss the standard account of the function of acknowledgments in scholarly communication, then we introduce a new interpretative framework in which the acknowledgments are intended as positioning signals exchanged by researchers. Next, we provide the formal definition of the four acknowledgments-based networks that stand at the core of the method, and we test it on a humanities field, analytic philosophy. Results show that acknowledgement-based networks allow to reconstruct the fine-grained social structure of analytic philosophy from different perspectives. Furthermore, by comparing the citation-based maps of the field with the acknowledgments-based networks, it permits to shed light on the relationship between the intellectual and social layer of analytic philosophy. We conclude by presenting practical limitations of the method and by sketching some further research lines. (shrink)