Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. _The Crisis of Ugliness_, published here in English for the first time, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics.

The object of this research is the fragmented everyday life of social life practices. The subject of the research is personal stories realized in storytelling and considered as the result of the creative activity of the subject and a way to overcome the fragmentation of everyday life of modern culture. The authors consider the fragmentation of everyday life as a factor in the desocialization of the subject and the leveling of unified mechanisms of social interaction. Storytelling is defined as a (...) way for a person to consistently present various storylines and broadcast the principles of their personal existence, creating an effect of belonging among recipients and awakening their imagination. The research substantiates that storytelling resources allow a subject to broadcast personal values, creatively express their individuality through virtual self-presentation and respond to current public demands, thereby overcoming the fragmentation of everyday life. As the conclusions of the research, the authors state that public order and social interaction are conditioned by the influence of the narratives of each subject on the foundation of their own being and the formation of a vector of development of all participants in intersubjective relations through the dissemination of the principles of personal existence in the storytelling system. The authors emphasize the creative nature of personal stories, the creation and telling of which is a prerequisite for the formation of unified principles of social existence due to the transmitted ideas about socially acceptable rules and stable patterns of behavior that become a set of rituals. The authors conclude that personal stories allow the subject to overcome fragmented everyday life, move to a qualitatively new level of normative determination, develop a strategy of self-identity and move from a separate way of being to a holistic existence in the context of intersubjective interactions. (shrink)

The object of this paper is creativity as a cultural philosophical and historical-philosophical phenomenon. The subject of the research is the substantiation of the essence of creativity by Russian religious philosophy on the example of the doctrine of V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev. The aim of this research is to identify and articulate the key semantic constructs of creativity from the positions of the above-mentioned thinkers. The article also explores ideas about the nature of creativity and the specific features of (...) a creative subject through the prism of relevant concepts of a socio-humanitarian orientation. A brief historical and philosophical excursion into the understanding of the ontological essence of creativity is carried out, modern ontological concepts of creativity are revealed and an existentially oriented concept of creativity is proposed. The theoretical basis of the research is the original works of V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev, as well as various commenting scientific sources. The methodological foundation of the research is a comparative analysis and a method of contextual vision of creativity. The main result of the conducted research is the articulation of key aspects of the understanding of creativity by V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev. It is shown that for the first philosopher, the central task of creativity is the spiritualization of the material world through the realization of the unity of Goodness, Truth and Beauty, while the second thinker considers the main mission of creativity to be the establishment of a fundamentally different spiritual being by the subject. The scientific novelty of the research also lies in the comparative characterization of the concepts of creativity of these thinkers in terms of essence, tasks, meaning, material, sources, functions, result and other structural aspects. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of Law and Legal Thinking in Critical Theory with specific reference to the arguments that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer in their book Commonwealth. The core idea is that Critical Theory is no less radical, but much more concrete, when it is performing not only an external, but also an internal critique of the Law. It shows that the role of the law in critical theory emerges as a problem when the latter claims that (...) ‘there is no outside’ and that ‘the legal base of the system structures our lives.’ It then discusses optimistic and pessimistic strategies to overcome the problem, and argue for a demanding strategy which consist in articulating the external and the internal critique of the law. To make this point, the paper goes back to the epistemic context in which critical attitudes are deployed (the ‘Conflict of the Faculties’), describes the four theoretical moves constitutive of the historical moment in which, at the end of the 18th Century, modern law as we know it was conceived of and founded; and sketches the key moments of the history of the internal critique of the law. It then illustrates the demanding strategy with examples taken from the field of Intellectual Property, and concludes that the Law is malleable and open enough to allow the thinking and practicing of radical alternatives from within the legal system and also that alternatives spoken in the language of the law are no less radical, but certainly, more concrete than others. (shrink)

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky's program in linguistics. This approach is thought to provide a fruitful perspective from which to investigate moral competence from computational, ontogenetic, behavioral, physiological and phylogenetic perspectives. In this article, (...) I outline a framework for UMG and describe some of the evidence that supports it. I also propose a novel computational analysis of moral intuitions and argue that future research on this topic should draw more directly on legal theory. (shrink)

My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. (...) Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers. (shrink)