Many methods are conceivable for resolution of the difficulties arising when motion is depicted in the logic of concepts. We shall set forth some of these methods, presenting them within the framework of the discussion in which V. I. Sviderskii, B. A. Dragun, and I. S. Narskii have already participated. In our opinion, attention must be directed primarily to the fact that in resolving the contradictions in the presentation of motion by means of ideal mathematical abstractions, it is impossible to (...) base ourselves directly upon that which is occurring in the sphere of the things which we perceive with our senses. It is particularly when one forgets this fact that contradictory situations usually result. However, this does not at all mean that these data are of little value in treating of motion. Furthermore, the refinement of the meaning of the concepts in terms of which motion is described, taken together with the requirement that there be a rigorous differentiation between theories based on ideal abstractions and theories based on concepts derived from the sphere of empirical existence, may lead to the resolution of Zeno's paradoxes. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an interview in a student’s group on the problem of the fall into sin based on the discussion at the seminar of Dante's «divine Comedy». The authors consider human as an image and likeness of God, who creates himself, choosing between good and harm. There were changes in the perception of the structure of Inferno: the number of circles of hell in the minds of young people interviewed decreased: all respondents do not see sin (...) in unbelief, three-quarters of respondents − in gluttony, half − in lust. The inter-pretation of heresy and fraud as ways to promote their projects is relevant. The effect of absolute rejection of violence, contemptuous attitude to treachery is revealed. The authors believe that secularization has touched only the first five circles of Hell, but at the bottom everything is still the same. (shrink)

Marx said that a science attains perfection when it is successful in employing mathematics.

In the academic year just past, the Expert Commission on Philosophical Disciplines of the Higher Certification Committee [VAK] processed 441 cases pertaining to the award of degrees and ranks. Of these, positive decisions were handed down in 333 cases, and negative decisions in 9 cases, while final decisions have not yet been taken on 99. Of the total number, 418 cases were examined, 114 of these for the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences and 304 for Candidate in Philosophical Sciences, (...) and final decisions were taken on 323, while 95 were referred to further expert examination. (shrink)

Much attention is given to education in philosophy in the USSR, in which the study of dialectical and historical materialism occupies a special place. The practical achievements involved in the transformation of society, together with the advance of the natural and social sciences, have demonstrated most clearly the great strength of dialectical materialism as the scientific world view of the working people and as the philosophical foundation of their practical activity. It is therefore no accident that philosophy has an immense (...) attraction for people in our country. (shrink)

The constantly accelerating progress of contemporary natural science is indissolubly associated with the development and use of mathematics and with the processes of mathematical modeling of the phenomena of nature. The essence of this diverse and highly fertile interaction of mathematics and natural science and the dialectics of this interaction can only be disclosed through analysis of the nature of theoretical notions in general. Today, above all in the ranks of materialistically minded researchers, it is generally accepted that theory possesses (...) a value of its own. Contrary to positivist concepts of the nature of our knowledge, the meaning and significance of theory do not consist merely of the recording of experimental data, their classification and notation in abbreviated form. The meaning of theory is considerably more significant and is revealed, above all, in its explanatory and predictive functions. Contemporary theoretical knowledge is quite advanced and comprises a highly complex system, relatively self-contained and capable of internal development. Mathematics is the most interesting and distinctive phenomenon in the system of theoretical knowledge, in the system of science in general. It is in its dialectical development that the internal force and dynamics of the development of theory, in the very broadest sense of that word, find expression. Paul Lafargue tells us that Karl Marx held that "science only attains perfection when it succeeds in making use of mathematics" . In many fields of research the formulation of new ideas and concepts rests upon mathematics, its concepts and notions, and "is suggested" by the latter. "Mathematics," writes F. Dyson, "is the main source of the notions and principles out of which new theories are created" . The basic significance of mathematics to theory has been noted by outstanding thinkers over the course of the entire history of development of science. Today the expressive phrase, "the mathematization of knowledge," has come into general currency as a description of the principal direction of growth of theoretical notions in natural science. However, with respect to the growth of modern theoretical physics in general, the statement that it develops primarily by the method of the mathematical hypothesis has general validity. For example, the principal findings and discoveries of quantum theory and particle physics, starting from the corpuscularwave dualism and terminating with the omega minus hyperon and hypothetical quarks, were obtained or made "at the tip of a mathematician's pen.". (shrink)

A hundred years have passed since publication of the first edition of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which Lenin regarded as "one of the basic works of modern socialism." Engels's interest in the remote past of mankind and Lenin's evaluation of his work were, of course, not coincidental. They may be explained by the tremendous role played by the concept of primitive history in a general materialist understanding of the universal historical process. What (...) was the nature of this very first term in the sequence of socioeconomic formations, this cornerstone of the Marxist concept of universal history? When did private property, antagonistic social classes, and state power, separate from the people, emerge, and what were they, original and permanent institutions, or historically determined institutions of human communal life? These problems are clearly of great philosophical importance. They were, and continue to be, the arena of a bitter ideological struggle, and inevitably attracted the most conscientious attention of the founders of scientific communism. (shrink)

В кн. также: Современный опыт теодицеи и антроподицеи / В. Шубин.

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo], along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo] , along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

As with every new trend in science, cybernetics has revived many old philosophical problems and posed a number of new ones. They include problems of similarity and difference in the functioning of the brain and of cybernetic machines, interrelationships between artificial creations and human beings, the nature of the machine, etc. An imprecise posing of these intimately related problems is often the source of confusion in discussions of the philosophical problems of cybernetics.

Not only Greek philosophers listened to prophets. René Descartes also long pondered over the familiar words of Ausonius: "What path shall I choose for myself in life?" And-what an amusing play on words-the idea of methodos entered philosophy with Descartes. The very path of his metaphysical thought was the last possible one within the confines of Aristotelian metaphysics, when, having posited certain principles of discourse, in the end they themselves are conclusively reached and the entire system becomes a manifest certainty. (...) Descartes provides a glimpse of the possibility of a new type of metaphysical reflection in which the correctness of the chosen principles is grounded in the completeness and noncontradictoriness of the system built on their basis but not confined to them. (shrink)

In a fluent, clear, and lively style this translation by two of Maslov's junior colleagues brings the work of the late Soviet scientist S. Yu. Maslov to a wider audience. Maslov was considered by his peers to be a man of genius who was making fundamental contributions in the fields of automatic theorem proving and computational logic. He published little, and those few papers were regarded as notoriously difficult. This book, however, was written for a broad audience of readers and (...) describes elegant examples of applications in such fields as computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, economic modeling, and biological modeling, among others. The book also brings to light the work by the American mathematician E. L. Post, which inspired Maslov's own work in the development of a general theory and which has been long neglected by mathematicial logicians and systems theorists in the United States. The book's first chapter introduces the Rules of the Game. Part I, Mathematics of Calculi, covers E. L. Post's canonical systems, deductive systems and algorithms, and probabilistic calculi and deductive information. Part II, Horizonal Modeling, takes up a "toy" economy, the calculi of technological possibilities, and the development of rules. Part III, Vertical Modeling, deals with the topics of "to fight and to search" and the consequences of the asymmetry of cognitive mechanisms. Vladimir Lifschitz is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Michael Gelfond with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas, El Paso. Theory of Deductive Systems and Its Applicationsis included in the Foundation of Computing Series, edited by Michael Garey. (shrink)

The triumph of the socialist revolution in Russia, the fiftieth anniversary of which the Soviet people are marking this year, the building of socialism in the USSR, and the coming into being of a world socialist system eliminated the ideological monopoly theretofore enjoyed by exploitative society in the contemporary world. For the first time in human history, an ideology of the toiling masses has extensively taken root in a number of countries. This has meant a narrowing of the sphere in (...) which bourgeois ideology is dominant, and could not fail to have a bearing upon all the forms of social consciousness in the capitalist world, including philosophy. (shrink)

My reflections will have more of an interrogative than an affirmative character. And the questions will be posed not only to others but also to myself. At the outset let me broach two questions. First, why is this work ethic needed; and second, who needs it? And at the same time I should like to translate some of the general ideological and cultural problems that have been discussed here into the language of political economy and sociology. This should, it seems (...) to me, enable us more quickly to find the common language between our emotionally colored discussions about Russia and the "Western" understanding of it. Otherwise, regardless of whether we discuss our Russian situation from a Slavophile or a Westernizing point of view, what one always gets in the final analysis is that Russia cannot be understood with the intellect. And if that is so, then why all this "intellectual noise". (shrink)

One of the primary propositions in Marxist philosophy is that thought is historical in nature. "The theoretical thought of each epoch," observed Engels, "is a historical product which takes on very different forms at different times, and also very different content" . Accordingly, any analysis of the nature of thought in general that does not consider its historical character is either incomplete or may result in false conclusions. Naturally, what we are talking about is substantive thought, i.e., thought that proceeds (...) on a basis of elaboration and development of definite principles relating to the structure and evolution of material existence, and that is expressed in terms of knowledge concerning nature, society, and man. (shrink)

I would like to tell you about my own road to the serious pursuit of philosophy, relying only on my own memory, although occasionally I shall check this against other testimony. These are merely the notes of a witness and participant in the events described.

The present epoch is one of transition from capitalism to socialism, within which two opposite social systems exist simultaneously. Inasmuch as one of the systems - that of capitalism - is a source of wars, and the system of socialism is the source of peace, questions pertaining to the place of military means in the struggle between the two systems, questions of the struggle between the forces of war and peace and for the cessation of wars between peoples, constitute one (...) of the most important elements in the meaning of the epoch. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution" [0 60-i godovshchine Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii] states: "The Great October opened a new epoch - that of the transition of humanity from capitalism to socialism, the epoch of struggle for liberation of people from imperialism, for cessation of wars between peoples, for overthrow of the dominance of capitalism, for socialism.". (shrink)

I think we will agree that there are questions that it is not always preferable to put point-blank. Among them we may class that of whether ethics belongs to the category of philosophical knowledge. We know that the custom of regarding ethics as knowledge exclusively philosophical in nature persists to this day. Such a notion, with origins in the past, expresses, in our view, the dominance of spontaneous, uncontrollable factors in the real morality of society. In Hegel's expression, ethical theory (...) usually came too late: all that was left for it to do was to interpret various changes that had taken place in moral attitudes, shifts in the world of moral reflection and moral feeling. But sometimes it entered the picture entirely too early. On the one hand, this means that ethical theory has been insufficiently oriented toward practice, limiting itself to the rationalization of spontaneously established views and preferences of moral consciousness that we were incapable of abandoning. On the other hand, it testifies that the moral regulation of people's behavior was to only a very small degree subject to the need to be equipped with theory, inasmuch as practice itself was strongly constrained within the narrow limits of the processes of life . Ethical theory, for the most part, provided the morality actually being practiced with various philosophical illusions, in the form of compensatory and adaptive viewpoints, and, along with this, offered certain regulatory notions in the area of socialization to morality. (shrink)