In recent years there has been rather extensive discussion in the physics literature of the possibility of transmission of material effects at speeds exceeding that of light.

It is customary to associate the birth of European science with the name of Thales. For example: "In the history of mankind there come moments when new forms of action or thought arise so suddenly that they produce the impression of an explosion. Such is precisely the case with the rise of science—rationalistic scientific knowledge—in Asiatic Greece, in Ionia, at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., with Thales of Miletus and his school".

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)

Lü-shih ch'un-ch'iu [Spring and Autumn of the House of Lü] appeared on the scene in 239 B.C. This was the latter part of the Warring States period. Our country's transition from slavery to feudalism had already been basically completed, but chaotic wars of secession among the feudal princes still occurred. Remnant forces of the slave system were still quite strong, and the restoration-counterrestoration struggle between the declining slave-owning class and the newly emerging landlord class was proceeding violently. Lü Pu-wei was (...) a careerist and plotter of the declining slave-owning class and a representative of the Confucians. In response to the needs of the slave-owning class's counterrevolutionary restoration, Lü adopted the tactic of "attacking the mind." He sneaked into the government of the newly emerging landlord class in the state of Ch'in and played the role of an ardent vanguard for restoration. This big commercial slave owner, who had originally run around among Ch'in, Chao, and other states, had amassed thousands of gold pieces at home and possessed more than ten thousand slaves. He played around with political conspiracies and became chancellor of the state of Ch'in. Before King Ying Cheng of Ch'in personally took power in 238 B.C., political power fell for a time into Lü's hands. Lü Pu-wei worked in collusion with Lao Ai, a eunuch he sponsored, and joined the industrial and commercial slave owners and the aristocratic slave owners to form a frenzied restorationist force. On the one hand, they formed factions to strengthen private interests, expanded their power, and prepared for an armed coup d'état. On the other hand, they took in riff-raff [literally, people who had surrendered and rebelled], assembled Confucian scholars, set to work on ideology, and grandly created public opinion for the restoration of the slave system. At that time, a reactionary adverse current favoring the restoration of the slave system hung over the state of Ch'in. Lü-shih ch'un-ch'iu, which was compiled under Lü's direction by his retainers, was the product of this adverse current. (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)

The transition in the discussion of activity from production-labor and industrial-technological problems to practical problems of life activity proper means that forms of life activity that were formerly unshakable are now becoming the primary object of transformations and purposeful changes: the family, kinship systems, forms of communal life, the genetic basis of man, and man himself with his various capabilities and functions.

A hundred years have passed since the death of a man named Karl Marx. A whole century. A century of dramatic upheavals, revolutionary turmoil, and radical changes in the destiny of humankind. A century that has overturned and swept away a multitude of philosophical conceptions, social theories, and political doctrines. A century that has seen a continuous succession of victories of Marxism and its growing influence on social development.

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)

Postmodernism as a mythologem reflecting the remarkable shift that has taken place in contemporary Western culture as a whole entered the consciousness of our intelligentsia with the usual delay. This is not surprising if one bears in mind the constantly "lagging" character of our consciousness, which also colors in corresponding tones the whole of "Russian civilization," and if one believes that it is condemned to be always "catching up" and making up for lost time. Having arisen in the West as (...) a concept describing certain special characteristics of the latest architectural style that no longer fitted into the rather passé category of modernism, the concept of the postmodern was initially current, both in the West and in Russia, among people close to architecture. At that time it had not yet been able to acquire the "philosophical" subtext that is already felt in the book of Charles Jencks that came out in 1977 in Germany under the gaudy title The Language of Postmodern Architecture. (shrink)

The fundamentals of the Frankfurt school's conception of art were expounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the "critical theory of society" appeared in the form of a specific philosophy of history—the history of bourgeois enlightenment, whose sources the authors trace to ancient Greek mythology.

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)

The comparative analysis of the approaches to philosophy and philosophizing by the two prominent Russian thinkers of the Soviet era: Evald V. Ilyenkov and Merab K. Mamardashvili. The author discusses specific methodological and conceptual features of Ilyenkov's dialectic and Mamardashvili's phenomenology, showing their theoretical and topical affinity.

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)

The aesthetic comprehension of works of art has two aspects: it sheds light on something of essential importance in the work itself and in its creator, and at the same time enriches and enhances its own problematic. For, "A work of art in which thought is alienated from itself is also part of the domain of comprehending thought; and the spirit, submitting itself to the requirements of scientific investigation, thereby clearly satisfies a need of its own most innermost nature.".

In recent years the science of what is to be, futurology, has become one of the most popular branches of knowledge in the West. A fever to prognosticate, the desire to penetrate the barriers of time, to predict or at least sense the central direction of history, possesses philosophers and historians, economists and sociologists, politicians and preachers, public figures, and the heads of scientific institutions and of the largest industrial firms. In the United States, England, France, and Italy, committees to (...) study the shape of the future organization of society appear one after the other. Journals of futurology are founded. Special conferences, seminars, colloquiums and even religious meetings are convened, which produce a veritable squall of prognoses, projects both abstract and narrowly practical, spiritualist prophecies, and predictions positive and irrational. (shrink)

Changes in the productive forces and, consequently, in the economic structure of socialist society as a whole are being prepared by the current relationships of production. We refer particularly to the influence of socioeconomic processes under the conditions of the revolution in science and technology on the development of the individual as a factor in the productive forces and as subject in production relationships.

In the earthly city, then, we find two things-its own obvious presence, and its symbolic presentation of the heavenly city. Now citizens are begotten to the earthly city by nature vitiated by sin, but to the Heavenly City by grace freeing nature from sin.

The transition of various countries to socialism is giving birth to a constantly increasing diversity of concrete forms of implementation of the functions of the socialist revolution. At the same time, historical experience shows that the socialist revolution is characterized by certain universal regularities, so that it is a matter of principle, of vital importance, that a revolutionary Marxist party allow for them. Among these, above all, is the need for power to be in the hands of the working class (...) in alliance with all others who labor, the need for abolishing the socio-economic dominance of the capitalist class, and for the new authority to have the capacity to overcome any form of resistance by the class opponents of socialism while uniting the masses of the workers at large in the struggle for the building of the new society. Without the organization and cohesion of the laboring masses headed by the working class, and without converting them into the determining political force, a transition to socialism is impossible: this is the most important conclusion of Marxism-Leninism. This conclusion has found precise expression, with room for all possibilities, in the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the political essence of the transition from capitalism to 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)