Departing from a traditional view of Mamardashvili as a merely a philosopher of consciousness, the author discusses the thinker's original contributions to the philosophy of culture.

The investigations of Aza A. Takho-Godi, devoted to the evolution of concepts and terms in European culture, were ahead of their time and, as it turns out today, paved the way for historical semantics, which turned out to be a kind of independent version of the “history of concepts”: a direction of humanitarian thought aimed at identifying cultural, social, and political functions concepts in their historical dynamics and in relation to a wide field of cultural interactions of a particular era. (...) The impressive results of “historical semantics” in the version of Takho-Godi are connected not only with the masterful and strictly substantiated identification of the developing conceptual core of lexemes, not only with the penetrating intuitions of the living word, but also with the vision of an absolute spiritual context in which semantic worlds are driven not by mechanical causality and not by historical chance, but by a kind of teleology. (shrink)

This article discusses the foundation of ideas for Vyacheslav Ivanov’s interpretation of Pushkin’s poem. In The Gypsies, Ivanov sees a conflict between personal freedom and sobornost’ as revealed b...

This article attempts to analyze Karsavin’s theory of revolution in the broader context of a Russian metaphysics of revolution in order to determine the place of Karsavin’s phenomenology of revolution both in his work and within Eurasianist ideology. His article “Phenomenology of Revolution” ontologically links two key concepts within Karsavin’s understanding: the “symphonic person” and the “ruling stratum.” The meaning of revolution consists in leading the symphonic person to a realization of its main tasks, which require the utmost exertion and (...) are related to the very existence of its historical form. This crisis can result in the person’s death, but in the death of the old person is born a new individuation of a higher order of personhood for whom that revolution has been a rebirth. If the symphonic person succeeds in “being revived through death or recovery,” then this will also be the birth of a new ruling stratum and a new government, that is, its new being as a state. Karsavin thus clarifies the historical functions both of the symphonic person and of the ruling stratum. The latter turns out to be a kind of entelechy of the symphonic person, providing its own personal content to the generic concept. The concept of the ruling stratum is explained in the metaphysical context of the symphonic-person theory. In light of the symphonic person’s mission, the ruling stratum is an organic connection among individuals of the active sociocultural segment of the population that has resonated with the spirit of history and the people. In this case, the stratum “rules” along with parties and institutions, eventually passing judgment on them. The main results of Karsavin’s work are (1) modeling a developmental phase of revolution and (2) the concept of the ruling stratum, which allows us to avoid formal sociological understanding of the active elite and direct our attention to the connection between personal activity and the “silent” but by no means “sleeping” substrate of the nation that manifests itself in critical epochs. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of the fate of the generation that peaked between the 1970s and 1990s, this article discusses the possibility of linking times of disintegration even when the machine of a powe...

The First World War forced the Russian intelligentsia to rethink its values—values that had been constructed in the nineteenth century. Distancing itself from pacifism and cultural relativism, it began to search for a moral meaning to the war that broke out in 1914—i.e. to defend the war as morally right and having a higher spiritual purpose. Russian philosophers were central to these debates, as they tried to interpret the war, and the relationship between war and peace, from a metaphysical point (...) of view. The paper will look at philosophical, ethical and religious aspects of these debates, and some of the philosophers who participated in them. (shrink)

La polémique entre V. Soloviev et L. Lopatine met en lumière les recherches de la philosophie russe sur son mode propre de compréhension du Moi. Pour Soloviev, on ne peut attribuer au sujet de la conscience en tant que tel une réalité autre que phénoménologique. Lopatine propose une variante, proche de Leibniz, selon laquelle le Moi est une conscience subjective, présente aux différents niveaux du développement spirituel. Cette interprétation est reprise et développée, dans une certaine mesure, par N. Losski. G. (...) Chpet tire un bilan de la discussion, en posant le caractère « communautaire » [ obščnost ’] particulier du Moi, qui se réalise non par la « généralisation » [ obobščenie ] mais par la « communication » [ obščenie ]. (shrink)

jild-i 1. Āzādī va marzʹhāyash -- jild-i 2. Istiqlāl (farhangī).

Recent preclinical studies have shown the feasibility of specific variants of nuclear transfer to prevent mitochondrial DNA disorders. Nuclear transfer could be a valuable reproductive option for carriers of mitochondrial mutations. A clinical application of nuclear transfer, however, would entail germ-line modification, more specifically a germ-line modification of the mitochondrial genome. One of the most prominent objections against germ-line modification is the fear that it would become possible to alter ‘essential characteristics’ of a future person, thereby possibly violating the child's (...) right to an open future. As only the nuclear DNA would contain the ingredients for individual characteristics, modification of the mtDNA is often considered less controversial than modification of the nuclear DNA. This paper discusses the tenability of this dichotomy. After having clarified the concept of germ-line modification, it argues that modification of the mtDNA is not substantively different from modification of the nuclear DNA in terms of its effects on the identity of the future person. Subsequently the paper assesses how this conclusion affects the moral evaluation of nuclear transfer to prevent mtDNA disorders. It concludes that the moral acceptability of germ-line modification does not depend on whether it alters the identity of the future child—all germ-line modifications do—but on whether it safeguards the child's right to an open future. If nuclear transfer to prevent mtDNA disorders becomes safe and effective, then dismissing it because it involves germ-line modification is unjustified. (shrink)

This paper explores the use of an ethics framework based on the Public Health Code of Ethics to guide rationing decisions during a pandemic flu crisis involving a shortage of ventilators. While the law provides public health officials with authority to act, public health officials, as community leaders and health department managers, must address complex questions about how they should use their legal authority, how they can ethically justify a particular action, how they should engage community stakeholders in decision making, (...) and how the process of public justification should take place. Recognising the need for a tool that could help public health officials manage ethical tensions in practice, such as allocation of scarce resources, the Public Health Leadership Society led efforts to develop a Public Health Code of Ethics. The 12 Principles in the Code were written to express the general norms implicit in the practice of public health professionals. The Code offers no hierarchical weighting of the different principles and anticipates that weights and specification of the principles would take place in the context of each community through a process of engagement between public health officials and community stakeholders about specific cases. We describe how public health officials can use the Code to guide deliberation in helping communities prepare to address the tragic choices when allocating scarce ventilators in an influenza pandemic. (shrink)

В книге продолжается обсуждение тем, представленных в труде "Психология нравственности", изданном в 2010 году. Авторы обсуждают пути решения проблем и преодоления переживаемого нашим обществом глубокого нравственного кризиса.

Издание содержит: теоретические основания субъектного подхода в психологии; основные направления психологического анализа; экспериментальные исследования психологии субъекта и др.

Discussion of the concept of evil in Indian philosophy.

The Johns Hopkins-Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program (FABTP) has offered a fully-funded, one-year, non-degree training opportunity in research ethics to health professionals, ethics committee members, scholars, journalists and scientists from countries across sub-Saharan Africa. In the first 9 years of operation, 28 trainees from 13 African countries have trained with FABTP. Any capacity building investment requires periodic critical evaluation of the impact that training dollars produce. In this paper we describe and evaluate FABTP and the efforts of its trainees.Our data (...) show that since 2001, the 28 former FABTP trainees have authored or co-authored 105 new bioethics-related publications; were awarded 33 bioethics-related grants; played key roles on 78 bioethics-related research studies; and participated in 198 bioethics workshops or conferences. Over the past nine years, trainees have collectively taught 48 separate courses related to bioethics and have given 170 presentations on various topics in the field. Many former trainees have pursued and completed doctoral degrees in bioethics; some have become editorial board members for bioethics journals. Female trainees were, on average, less experienced at matriculation and produced fewer post-training outputs than their male counterparts. More comprehensive studies are needed to determine the relationships between age, sex, previous experience and training program outputs. (shrink)