This article explores the question of literary criticism in the context of interactions between literature and philosophy. The best example of such interaction is the legacy of the early twentieth century Russian literary critic, Yuly Aykhenvald. This article gives a brief overview of his works of literary criticism and their thematic repertoire. Aykhenvald’s philosophical background, professional education, and personal connections with renowned Russian thinkers, including Vladimir Solovyov, Fyodor Stepun, and Semyon Frank, are included in an evaluation of Aykhenvald’s position on (...) one of the most discussed relationships in Russian culture—that of Russia and the West. The issue of relations between the West and Russia acquired a particular urgency after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian culture split into two realms—Soviet and émigré. This article analyzes Aykhenvald’s position on this issue, which is present in both his philosophical responses to the Eurasianists and in his essays written on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth. Throughout the mid-1920s Aykhenvald wrote that Pushkin was the ideal of spiritual and aesthetic balance. In Pushkin’s work Aykhenvald found the embodiment of his own historiosophical aspirations—the harmonious fusion of Russia and the West. (shrink)

This article is devoted not only to Losev''sphilosophical works, but also to his fiction,which he created during 1930s and 1940s.Losev''s eight books of the 1920s (his``octateuch'''') combine into a single whole thatamounts to his philosophy of life and historydepicted in expressive images. At the same timeLosev''s ``octateuch'''' strikes one as having beenwritten at a single sitting and in a singlestyle, in a genre that can be identified as the``philosophical novel'''' having as much right asSpengler''s opus to be called an ``intellectualnovel.'''' (...) In his prose of the 1930s and 1940sLosev tries with artistic methods to resolvethe philosophical problems which he raised inhis works of the 1920s. Losev''s ``octateuch'''' andhis fiction are directed against thosecontemporary materialists who seek to embodyPlato''s Republic, whom he christens``soil-less nihilist idealist utopians.'''' All ofthis leads to the conclusion that Losev''sintellectual novel belongs to a definite andmore specific subgenre. It is undoubtedly ananti-utopia, full of the grotesque. In additionto its scientific and social orientation,Losev''s anti-utopia is also religious innature. Thus Losev not only depicts the realconsequences of utopian dreams, but also turnsto the ``life of the artist,'''' which is far fromany technological or social utopias but isfilled with another, no less terrifying ornihilistic utopia: that of the non-religiousexistence of the human person. Losev preservedhis anti-utopian and anti-nihilist viewsthrough his late period (1950s–1980s), despitethe care he took not to cross Sovietcensorship. Losev''s anti-utopia is the kind ofChristian realism to which he appealedthroughout his life. (shrink)

The life of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev is in many respects a genuine riddle, which we, his contemporaries, will be puzzling over for a long time. "Man as symbol," "man as myth," "a servant of truth," "the last outstanding philosopher of the Russian ‘Silver Age,"’ "the greatest Russian humanist and philosopher of the present era," "an ascetic," "a guardian of intellectual tradition," "a chosen spirit," "a passionate devotee of the dialectic method," "a Russian thinker," "one of the most notable Russian philosophers (...) and philologists of the twentieth century," "a man in whose person Russian philosophical thought revealed such power of talent, such keenness of analysis, and such strength of intuitive speculation" and whose ideas may be called "unquestionably the work of genius"—all these rapturous words of past decades which we have picked at random seem fully to confirm the felicitous destiny of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev, who lived out only four months of his ninety-fifth year, after having completed an eight-volume History of Classical Aesthetics [Istoriia antichnoi estetiki] and the major work Vladimir Solov'ev and His Times [VI. Solov'ev i ego vremia], and having left a list of printed works with more than 460 titles and another whole series of writings awaiting publication—scholarly writings on mythology, logic, mathematics, and medieval dialectics, and even novels. (shrink)

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)

Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications’ final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014–2016, we examine assigned reviewers’ preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration—the process of combining criterion scores into (...) overall impact scores—disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities—yet do not explain all of the variability—in preliminary overall impact scores. (shrink)

Considerable attention has focused on studying reviewer agreement via inter-rater reliability (IRR) as a way to assess the quality of the peer review process. Inspired by a recent study that reported an IRR of zero in the mock peer review of top-quality grant proposals, we use real data from a complete range of submissions to the National Institutes of Health and to the American Institute of Biological Sciences to bring awareness to two important issues with using IRR for assessing peer (...) review quality. First, we demonstrate that estimating local IRR from subsets of restricted-quality proposals will likely result in zero estimates under many scenarios. In both data sets, we find that zero local IRR estimates are more likely when subsets of top-quality proposals rather than bottom-quality proposals are considered. However, zero estimates from range-restricted data should not be interpreted as indicating arbitrariness in peer review. On the contrary, despite different scoring scales used by the two agencies, when complete ranges of proposals are considered, IRR estimates are above 0.6 which indicates good reviewer agreement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, with a small number of reviewers per proposal, zero estimates of IRR are possible even when the true value is not zero. (shrink)

At the beginning of the third millenium the aspect of truth comes out to be especially topical. The greatest interest is risen by existentialistic and social aspects of the truth issue. Their correlation studying is the most productive way to research the aspect of truth. An individual life passes under certain circumstances, one of them being social reality. Presence of other people, necessity of communication and correlation of individual and social substances allows emphasizing a social side of the truth aspect. (...) The notion of truth is shaped under condition of intersubjectivity or within the process of social subjects interaction. On the one hand it provides a possibility to take the truth as an objectively existing phenomenon, on the other hand it transfers individual valuables and strivings into generally significant field. So Truth is destined to stay one of the most important and notional for a person concepts (despite of post-modernism attempts not to use it basically), as it legitimates a universal principle of common valuables availability for all people on the earth. (shrink)

Long since, people tried to solve the mystery of the way that led to the appearance and propagation of living entities. However, no harmonious understanding of this mystery existed, because neither the scientifically grounded source minerals nor the ambient conditions were proposed and because it was groundlessly taken that the process of living matter origination is endothermal. The Life Origination Hydrate Theory (LOH-Theory) first suggests the chemical way capable of leading from the specified abundant natural minerals to origination of multitudes (...) of multitudes of simplest living entities and gives an original explanation for the phenomena of chirality and racemization delay. The LOH-Theory covers the period up to origination of the genetic code. The LOH-Theory is grounded on the following three discoveries based on the available information and on the results of our experimental works performed using original instrumentation and computer simulations. (1) There is the only one triad of natural minerals applicable for exothermal thermodynamically possible chemical syntheses of simplest living-matter components. (2) N-base, ribose, and phosphdiester radicals and nucleic acids as whole are size-compatible with structural gas-hydrate cavities. (3) The gas-hydrate structure arises around amido-groups in cooled undisturbed systems consisting of water and highly-concentrated functional polymers with amido-groups.The natural conditions and historic periods favorable for simplest living matter origination are revealed. The LOH-Theory is supported by results of observations, biophysical and biochemical experiments, and wide application of original three-dimensional and two-dimensional computer simulations of biochemical structures within gas-hydrate matrix. The instrumentation and procedures for experimental verification of the LOH-Theory are suggested. If future experiments are successful, they, possibly, could be the first step on the way to industrial synthesis of food from minerals, i.e., to execution of the work that is performed by plants. (shrink)

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractCephalopods provide a unique model system to investigate how organismal novelties evolve. In article number 1900073, Elena A. Ritschard et al. discuss how co-evolutionary signatures among various genomic characters have contributed to cephalopod organismal novelties and can be used to dissect their functional organization. Cover illustration by Hannah Schmidbaur.

RESUMO Este artigo tem como objetivo descrever os falantes de herança de russo em Harbin, os emigrantes idosos e seus descendentes, através do método de retratos sociais e de fala. A diáspora russa na China ocorreu no final do século XIX, quando a Ferrovia da China Oriental, um projeto conjunto russo-chinês, foi construída. Depois de 1952, começou um êxodo em massa da população russa da China: repatriação ou emigração para a Austrália, EUA e Brasil. No início do século XXI, menos (...) de dez membros da diáspora russa permaneciam em Harbin. A natureza específica da língua russa falada por emigrantes em Harbin foi descrita através do método de retratos sociais e de fala, usado para caracterizar as identidades dos falantes de herança. Esse método pode ser usado para analisar a língua dos emigrantes em diferentes países, para revelar os processos únicos e universais em relação a ela. Além disso, o artigo descreve estratégias e táticas para coletar material linguístico de informantes idosos. (shrink)

The multiple discussions on the mechanisms of interaction between scientific knowledge and socio-cultural context have brought no results. The question — "what type of interaction between culture and science is being realized — socio-cultural determination or (more feeble) socio-cultural conditionality" — remains open. The author suggests an alternative solution: speaking of the interaction between science and culture one should consider the idea of synchronicity introduced by C.G. Jung. Jung defined synchronicity as a third type of interrelation between various phenomena: it (...) is neither causal nor purely accidental, but rather a meaningful interconnection of events. As a case-study, the paper considers the role of synchronicity in the transition from Aristotle's understanding of space to its galileo-newtonian interpretation that played a key role in the emergence of new physics. The special attention is given to the role of synchronicity in evolution of contemporary physics. (shrink)

The author demonstrates the central role that the ideal of unity and simplicity has played in classical and contemporary science. She argues that despite current difficulties in realizing this ideal it has deep psychological roots and is therefore likely to persist.

ABSTRACT This article aims to describe the Russian heritage speakers in Harbin, elderly emigrants and their descendants, using the social and speech portraiting method. The Russian diaspora in China arose in the late 19th century when the Chinese-Eastern railway was built – a joint Russian-Chinese project. After 1952, a mass exodus of the Russian population from China began: repatriation or emigration to Australia, the USA and Brazil. In the early 21st century, less than ten members of the Russian diaspora remained (...) in Harbin. The specific nature of the Russian emigrant language in Harbin was described through the social and speech portraiting of the heritage speakers’ identities. This method may be used to analyze the language of emigrants in different countries, to reveal the unique and universal processes in it. Additionally, the article describes strategies and tactics for gathering language material from elderly informants. (shrink)

How genomic innovation translates into organismal organization remains largely unanswered. Possessing the largest invertebrate nervous system, in conjunction with many species‐specific organs, coleoid cephalopods (octopuses, squids, cuttlefishes) provide exciting model systems to investigate how organismal novelties evolve. However, dissecting these processes requires novel approaches that enable deeper interrogation of genome evolution. Here, the existence of specific sets of genomic co‐evolutionary signatures between expanded gene families, genome reorganization, and novel genes is posited. It is reasoned that their co‐evolution has contributed to (...) the complex organization of cephalopod nervous systems and the emergence of ecologically unique organs. In the course of reviewing this field, how the first cephalopod genomic studies have begun to shed light on the molecular underpinnings of morphological novelty is illustrated and their impact on directing future research is described. It is argued that the application and evolutionary profiling of evolutionary signatures from these studies will help identify and dissect the organismal principles of cephalopod innovations. By providing specific examples, the implications of this approach both within and beyond cephalopod biology are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to study the methodological foundations of the humanities education for international students as an alternative to transhumanist ideology. The paradigmatic approach is used as a factor analysis of students' educational processes. Particular attention is paid to the substantiation of the methodological foundations of the education humanisation on the basis of modern ontologically anthropological and religious‐anthropological achievements of the philosophical field of knowledge. The novelty of the study is due to a discussion of the contradictions (...) caused by all‐round technocratisation and informatisation, the fall of moral standards and the degradation of human behaviour. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to develop a different pedagogy and model of education for modern students. It was concluded that the value‐oriented pedagogical cocreation is able to direct the learner's self‐development and strengthen it with effective means of self‐change. (shrink)

Aleksei Fedorovich Losev did not share the hereditary Russian prejudice that science and philosophy exclude religion . Although he did not leave any specialized works in theology, the history of religion, or the foundations of the Christian worldview, many of his books, lines from letters, and fragments of conversations and, most importantly, his whole way of life and life journey show that all his life he reflected continuously and intensely on themes of the Christian faith and, primarily, of the Orthodox (...) faith that he confessed. Not only did he reflect on them, he lived by them. For Aleksei Fedorovich Christianity was never just an object of knowledge, a preoccupation of the reflective mind, but rather the profound foundation of his relationship with the world and with people. It constituted not only his thought and its foundation, but his very life. Religion, as Aleksei Fedorovich understood it, is first of all a certain kind of life, not just a personal worldview, however religious and mystical it might be. It was not a personal morality, however lofty or religious it might be, nor personal feeling or esthetics, however ardent the feeling might be or however perfectly mystical the esthetics. Religion, in his mind, is the realization of a worldview, the material substance of morality, the real affirmation of feeling; it is the life of the person directed to the persons substantial self-affirmation, to self-affirmation in eternity . In recounting the facts of Aleksei Fedorovichs spiritual biography I shall not follow their chronological order. The basic facts can be found in the works of A.A. Takho-Godi, D. Dzhokhadze, M. Gogotishvili, and others. (shrink)

Russia’s relations with the European Court of Human Rights since the time of Russia’s accession to the Council of Europe have received a lot of attention on the part of academic scholars, practitioners, and media. Research on the ECtHR became especially important in the context of the twentieth anniversary of Russia’s acceptance of ECtHR jurisdiction that coincided with the unprecedented worsening of relations between Russia and the European countries due to the 2014 Crimea annexation. With voices that consistently advocate Russia’s (...) exit from the CoE, we believe it necessary to examine Russia-ECtHR relations as they are presented in the academic narrative. Drawing mostly on Russian-language sources, we want to highlight the variety of overarching themes and arguments relating to the crisis caused by the 2015 Constitutional Court Decision. We would like to examine various dimensions of this “crisis,” in order to be able to conclude whether Russia’s reaction to the Markin case and cases of non-compliance that followed was indeed part of a broader strategy of “backlash against international courts” we are currently witnessing worldwide. In the conditions when Russia’s exit from the Council of Europe is as likely as ever, the possibility of the “snowball effect” on the part of other member states threatens undermine the very raison d’être of the European human rights protection system. (shrink)

The phenomenon of information conflict at the moment is an actual research object of many social and humanitarian disciplines. On the other hand, there is a lack of fundamental theoretical, primarily philosophical and methodological, research on this issue. This is expressed, inter alia, in the absence of philosophical and methodological grounds for isolating an information conflict from the totality of all objectively observed communications, i.e. demarcation of the phenomenon. The problem of finding criteria for an information conflict is of key (...) importance in the formation of the methodological foundations and categorical apparatus for studying this phenomenon. In this regard, the need to develop theoretical foundations for the demarcation of information conflict is an urgent research task. The object of this work is the phenomenon of information conflict as part of the communicative process. The subject of the research is the problem of demarcation of information conflicts from all aggregate communications. The purpose of the study is to describe and substantiate the existing object-oriented methodologies that allow for the demarcation procedure. The following tasks are adequately formulated for the purpose of the study: 1) describe the problem of demarcation; 2) identify the communicative grounds of the information conflict; 3) analyze and highlight the main approaches to the problem of demarcation of information conflict. The novelty of the work lies in the systematic description and structuring of methodological approaches to the problem of demarcation of information conflicts, as well as analysis of the boundaries of methodologies and approaches. In the course of the work, it was determined and proved that, relying solely on the theory of communication, it is impossible to adequately carry out the demarcation procedure; it is necessary to use additional, non-communicative demarcation criteria, which is due to the variety of demarcation approaches in various studies. In conclusion, conclusions are formulated about the limitations of object-oriented approaches for solving the problem of demarcation of information conflicts. (shrink)

To mitigate the potentially devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is vital to identify psychosocial and moral resources. The care, preservation, protection, and well-being of social communities are attributes of prosocial behavior that can be such a resource. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of prosocial orientation of Russian youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to identify strategies for prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample consisted of 447 people. The study was (...) conducted in May 2020 in the form of an online survey of subjects using Google Forms (“Moral Foundations Questionnaire method” and “Portrait Values Questionnaire”). The research made it possible to establish that Russians were dominated by norms of care, fairness, purity; values of benevolence-universalism, security, and self-direction. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the prosocial orientation of Russians may manifest itself in the following behavioral strategies: proactive prosocial strategy of “caring for others” (true altruism, expressed in forms of volunteering, helping a stranger, and charity despite the risk of contracting a coronavirus infection); egoistic strategy of prosocial behavior “self-care through caring for others” (volunteering based on self-development; helping a stranger to improve your own psychological well-being); conventional prosocial strategy “self-care” (self-isolation and preventive behavior). In the long run, it is necessary to identify personal and environmental resources that allowed people to effectively implement a prosocial self-isolation strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as various forms of volunteerism. (shrink)

The relationship between smell and politics could appear obscure; and yet, when it comes to smell, questions about freedom and constriction, social and ontological mingling or distinctions, clearly arise. In this paper, I will especially focus on the domain of food as a clear example for describing some of the political ambivalences characterizing the sense of smell. The aim is to pave the way for a more detailed ‘sociopolitical aesthetics of smell’ to come. I will stress epistemological and social features (...) of odors in order to highlight their ambivalence in knowledge and community life. Perceivers and odors will emerge as mingled bodies, highlighting an ongoing process of material as well as emotional affection. Moreover, I will present some relevant examples of smell as social status symbols in relation to the aesthetic values linked to class hierarchy. Consumerism and scented goods will be lastly discussed in order to shade light on contemporary perceptual phenomena and their role in the socioeconomic dimension. (shrink)

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving (...) their efficiency? (shrink)

The article describes two approaches to modeling the concept system of science – the thematic and paradigm ones. The re­search represents a case study of the two corpuses of abstracts: abstracts of projects supported by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Russian Federal Property Fund in lin­guistics, as well abstracts of articles by authors (and their co-au­thors) who have received multiple support from this foundation. Thematic modeling was carried out within the frameworks of two approaches: сcorpus based (...) approach (modeling the system of concepts as a holistic entity of term fields network), and single text approach (singling out compositions of term fields steadily present in the texts of projects which can be treated as separate branches of linguistics). The method of semantic graph modeling realized in the “Semograph” Information system (corpus based approach) and the K-means clustering method (single text based approach) were applied. Arrays of keywords (those that occurred in the abstracts of projects supported by the Foundation) grouped into term fields served as operational units. Paradigmatic model­ing was based on the analysis of network interaction of research­ers (created on the basis of the information on joint publications). After the hypergraph of researchers (2,108 state points) had been created, it was divided into subgraphs (network communities) by means of the modularity method (analogue of cluster analysis). Each cluster can be considered as a model of a scientific commu­nity that actualize a certain scientific paradigm; a set of clusters represents a model of the concept system of a certain subject domain from the point of view of representation and interrela­tion of several paradigms. The synthesis of thematic and paradig­matic models appears to be the direction for future research that involves modeling the concept system of science. The considered models can be applied as an effective means of monitoring, fore­casting and managing scientific research, i.e. as an instrument of state and/or department policy. (shrink)