This article provides a brief analysis of the life, work, and character of Nikolai Berdyaev. He is described as both a captive and apologist of freedom, and as an influential representative of existential personalism.

The article is devoted to the problem of the naming crisis of modern society. The sequences by which the social and cultural history of the West is ordered, represented by the evolution of economics, technology, religion, forms of capital and wealth, communications, following the technological acceleration of time, coexist with each other, compete for primacy, creating a society of atomized subjects who have ceased to understand their place in the history of society. This situation is described in the article as (...) an identity crisis. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the gaps that have been discovered in attempts to identify society, which are the object of criticism. The article refers to the tradition of explanatory modeling of social interactions in terms of psychopathology and psychiatry. The crisis of the identity of society is illustrated through the images of madness in modern art culture. The article hypothesizes that there is an unspoken ban on naming a society associated with the crisis of capitalism in the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies. Culture's interest in insanity serves as an indicator of a social crisis. The evolution of cultural interest in the figure of a madman from a frightening "outcast" to an attractive "rebel" is shown. The article suggests the tasks of critical philosophy that coincide with the tasks of caring for social health. The idea of the need for the deprivation of mental illness is expressed. Mental health care is considered as a social task. (shrink)

The absence of a clear influence of an animal's behavioral responses to Hebbian associative learning in the cerebral cortex requires some changes in the Hebbian learning rules. The participation of the brain monoaminergic systems in Hebbian associative learning is considered.

The absence of a clear influence of the responses modified by new connections created by LTP on the development of these connections casts doubt on an essential role of LTP in learning and memory formation without any association with reinforcement. The evidence for the involvement of the monoaminergic systems in synaptic potentiation in the cerebral cortex during learning is adduced, and their role in reinforcement system function is discussed.

Objective To determine the attitudes of Egyptian patients regarding their participation in research and with the collection, storage and future use of blood samples for research purposes. Design Cross-sectional survey. Study population Adult Egyptian patients (n=600) at rural and urban hospitals and clinics. Results Less than half of the study population (44.3%) felt that informed consent forms should provide research participants the option to have their blood samples stored for future research. Of these participants, 39.9% thought that consent forms should (...) include the option that future research be restricted to the illness being studied. A slight majority (66.2%) would donate their samples for future genetic research. Respondents were more favourable towards having their blood samples exported to other Arab countries (62.0%) compared with countries in Europe (41.8%, p<0.001) and to the USA (37.2%, p<0.001). Conclusions This study shows that many individuals do not favour the donation of a blood sample for future research. Of those who do approve of such future research, many favour a consent model that includes an option restricting the future research to the illness being studied. Also, many Egyptians were hesitant to have their blood samples donated for genetic research or exported out of the Arab region to the USA and European countries. Further qualitative research should be performed to determine the underlying reasons for many of our results. (shrink)

Svoeobrazie drevnerusskoĭ filosofskoĭ mysli -- Osnovnye napravlenii︠a︡ drevnerusskoĭ mysli -- Prilozhenie. Pami︠a︡tniki religiozno-filosofskoĭ mysli Drevneĭ Rusi.

t. 1. Problemy obshcheĭ teorii prava -- t. 2. Garantii prav lichnosti v ugolovnom sudoproizvodstve -- t. 3. Teorii︠a︡ sudebnykh dokazatelʹstv.

The human intestines are constantly under the influence of numerous pathological factors: enteropathogenic microorganisms, food antigens, physico‐chemical stress associated with digestion and bacterial metabolism, therefore it must be provided with a system of protection against adverse impact. Recent studies have shown that Paneth cells play a crucial role in maintaining homeostasis of the small intestines. Paneth cells perform many vital functions aimed at maintaining a homeostatic balance between normal microbiota, infectious pathogens and the human body, regulate the qualitative composition and (...) number of intestinal microorganisms, prevent the introduction of potentially pathogenic species, and protect stem cells from damage. Paneth cells take part in adaptive and protective‐inflammatory reactions. Paneth cells maintain dynamic balance between microbial populations, and the macroorganism, preventing the development of intestinal infections and cancer. They play a crucial role in gastrointestinal homeostasis and may be key factors in the etiopathological progression of intestinal diseases. (shrink)

To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

Purpose. To turn to the diaries and journalistic works by Leo Tolstoy, to study the content and method of his religious and ethical search. To doubt the faithfulness of his interpretation of the evangelical message of Christ. Theoretical basis. The author proceeded from the necessity of a dialectical understanding of the concepts of nonviolence, mercy, justice and a cultural-historical focus on the possibilities of society in realizing the spirituality principles. Originality. The author focuses on the unilateral nature of the methodology (...) that Leo Tolstoy uses to deny violence, as well as on the ambiguous role of Tolstoy's ideology in the morality of society. Conclusions. The spiritual activities an individual person is able to do and that are instructive for society from the point of view of its moral influence may not be sufficient means for educating moral responsibility in a society as a whole. Tolstoy's methodological approach to justifying the absoluteness of nonviolence principle is one-sided and not productive for a true interpretation of the spiritual nature of the Christ’s message about love and mercy. (shrink)

This study focuses on the interdisciplinary issue of language corpora mining for the purpose of cultural analytics. The authors utilize the comparative cross -cultural approach to highlight the dynamics of “revolution” concept throughout two and a half centuries. They study concept application through the word occurrence in five languages by the means of Google Books Ngram Viewer and trace the waves of concept “popularity”. Most of the word application peaks can be corresponded to the political events called “revolutions” but there (...) is also an exception. (shrink)

The article discusses the possibility of a naturalistic explanation of phenomenal experience (qualia). It starts with the analysis of one of the thought experiments described by D. Chalmers in his book “The Conscious Mind. In search of a fundamental theory”, namely, a zombie experiment. The article shows that the conclusions of this experiment can be recognized as correct only provided that the experimenter imagines a complete functional analogue of a human being. However, this condition is not feasible, since the experimenter (...) is required to possess the totality of knowledge about the imaginary creature. Experimenter’s imagination is in one way or another determined by the available conceptual schemes. It is concluded that the thesis of the irreducibility of qualia, based on the data of thought experiments, is a presupposition of conscious mind studies, and not their conclusion. From my point of view, this presupposition can be challenged just as N.I. Lobachevsky challenged the intuitive plausibility of Euclid’s fifth axiom. As an alternative understanding of the nature of qualia I propose J. McDowell's approach, which is called “perceptual conceptualism”. (shrink)

Résumé — Cet article fait le pari qu’il est possible d’assigner à Rousseau une théorie cohérente de la propriété et se propose de reconstruire cette théorie en distinguant, à partir des configurations empiriques de l’institution de propriété mobilisées par l’auteur, les trois moments logiques et chronologiques d’une histoire philosophique de la propriété : la propriété commune originaire, le domaine réel des États, les propriétés dans l’état civil. Cette théorie se laisse ainsi ramener à trois propositions essentielles : la propriété, rendue (...) nécessaire par l’évolution de l’espèce, n’en est pas pour autant moralement légitime, c’est pourquoi il revient à la loi républicaine de tracer la frontière entre le domaine public et celui des particuliers, de sorte que, dans l’état civil, le droit de propriété soit inviolable et absolu, quoique certaines des jouissances qu’il offre puissent être indirectement limitées dans le but de promouvoir l’accès de tous à la propriété.Cet article se veut de surcroît une illustration de l’importance que revêt la compréhension de la signification technique des concepts légaux pour l’intelligence de questions classiques de la philosophie politique.— This paper propose a reconstruction of Rousseau’s theory of Property Rights, based on the distinction of three logical and chronological moments of the philosophical history of property drawn by Rousseau : at the origins are the commons, then the foundation of State’s territories, and last the private and public property rights in the civil state. This theory is organized around the three following essential propositions : property became necessary, due to the evolution of human societies, but has never been morally legitimate. That’s why the Statutory Law, and more precisely, the Republican Statutory Law has to draw the border between public and individual property rights. The consequence is that individual property right, considered in itself, is absolute and inviolable, but some of the utilities included in this right can be indirectly limited by the Law, in order to promote equality in the access to individual Property. This paper shows that we should be aware of the importance of understanding properly the technical meaning of legal concepts in our readings of political philosophy. (shrink)

The main result of the present paper is that the variable-free fragment of logic K*, the logic with a single K-style modality and its “reflexive and transitive closure,” is EXPTIMEcomplete. It is then shown that this immediately gives EXPTIME-completeness of variable-free fragments of a number of known EXPTIME-complete logics. Our proof contains a general idea of how to construct a polynomial-time reduction of a propositional logic to its n-variable—and even, in the cases of K*, PDL, CTL, ATL, and some others, (...) variable-free—fragments. Complexity of countermodels for such fragments is considered. (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)

The article discusses the philosophical underpinnings of Mikhail Yu. Lermontov's poetry as chiefly expressed in the antithesis of heaven and earth. It is argued that in Russian spiritual culture, Lermontov was the first to bring together the opposed poles of God and man in the sphere of the God-man.

The article considers a fundamental contradiction between a hypertrophied desire to freely pursue one's goals and the insuperability of fate that is inherent in Mikhail Lermontov's novel Hero of Our Time [Geroi nashego vremeni] in which the drive for “freedom” precipitates meaningless rebellion. The collision between thought and the vital impulse causes the identity of the hero to split: thought turns out to be fruitless and life hopeless. This contradiction is symptomatic of cultural degeneration, and of the transformation of (...) cultural values into “simulacra”—the “superfluous man” is a simulacrum of identity. (shrink)

This book provides brief expositions of the central concepts in the field of Global Studies. Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev says, “The book is intelligent, rich in content and, I believe, necessary in our complex, turbulent, and fragile world.” 300 authors from 50 countries contributed 450 entries. The contributors include scholars, researchers, and professionals in social, natural, and technological sciences. They cover globalization problems within ecology, business, economics, politics, culture, and law. This interdisciplinary collection provides a (...) basis for understanding the concepts and methods within global studies and for accessing lengthier and more technical research in the field. The articles treat such important topics as the biosphere, ozone depletion, land resources and pollution, world health challenges, education, global modeling, sustainable development, war, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. The book also promotes academic cooperation, political dialogue, and mutual understanding across diverse traditions and national identities that are needed to engage successfully the many daunting challenges of globalization. (shrink)

The difficulty of the task that the authors of this book have posed themselves is due in the first instance to the fact that this period has been very little studied in the history of philosophy. In applying the term "early Russian philosophy" to the set of ideas, images, and conceptions of a philosophical order contained in the cultural texts of the tenth through the seventeenth centuries, M.N. Gromov and N.S. Kozlov see it not simply as a specific stage (...) in the development of Russian philosophy but as a "very particular phenomenon that is qualitatively unique and requires special study" . Thus the authors declare their own position in the far from finished debate about the specificity of Russian philosophy and the distinctive features of its historical development. They rely not only on the vast treasury of early Russian texts that have come down to us but also on the scholarship of historians of literature, language, painting, architecture, folklore, and other areas of culture. Of course, the book also gives careful consideration to the few studies that have been devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of early Russian culture, from the works of the Archimandrite Gavriil to the most recent works by Soviet and foreign authors published in decades just past. (shrink)

Au milieu du bouillonnement intellectuel des années vingt en U.R.S.S., Mikhaïl Bakhtine, philosophe et critique littéraire, sʹinterroge sur les rapports entre lʹidéologie, le langage et le psychisme. Refusant la dichotomie saussurienne langue / parole, qui vide la pratique linguistique de sa substance, il affirme la nature sociale du signe et pose les fondements dʹune linguistique de lʹénonciation en tant que manifestation sociale et non individuelle. Au signe figé, réduit à nʹêtre quʹun "signal", il oppose le signe mouvant, changeant, arène où (...) se jouent les conflits sociaux. Publié en 1929 à Leningrad sous le nom de Volochinov, élève de Bakhtine, cet ouvrage paraît pour la première fois sous le nom de son véritable auteur. -- Back cover. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief analysis of what it is to be moved by a death. It is written as an imitation of a famous European writer and it has an analysis of some newspaper material as well, which was just some gentle fun, if it be permitted.

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita was written between 1929 and 1940. Although delayed for a quarter of a century, it quickly found a stable place in our life as soon as it was published [for the first publication of the novel see: Moskva, 1966, no. 11; 1967, no. 1]. It is usually classified as a satirical philosophical novel. The satirical element puts it in the same family as such well-known works of the end of the '20s as (...) the novels of I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Twelve Chairs [Dvenadtsat' stul'ev] and The Golden Calf [Zolotoi telenok], but its emphatically philosophical orientation makes it all but a unique phenomenon in the history of Soviet literature. The novel's philosophical aspects have already been examined in a number of essays. Thus, for example, N. P. Utekhin analyzes the reflection of certain general philosophical categories in the novel. G. Chernikova and I. L. Galinskaia have endeavored to determine the concrete literary sources of the novel's philosophy [Chernikova 1971, pp. 213-219; Galinskaia 1986]. (shrink)

Criticizing the works of "Western" specialists in semantics, Soviet academician M. M. Pokrovskij (1868-1942) comes to the conclusion that social factors are essential for semantic evolution, while psychological factors constitute an intermediate link between the "external" life of a society and the semantics of the corresponding language. This conception resembles the general explanations of semantic evolution proposed by N. Ja. Marr (1864-1934). Nevertheless, despite a number of common points in the semantic theories of these two researchers, Pokrovskij's attitude towards Marr (...) was negative: in particular, he disagreed with the thesis of the chronological primacy of Marr's discoveries in the domain of semantics. The article investigates why Pokrovskij had for a long time constituted an intermediate link between Russian and "Western" "traditions" in the field of semantics. (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)

The aim of the dissertation is to formulate a research program in moral cognition modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar and organized around three classic problems in moral epistemology: What constitutes moral knowledge? How is moral knowledge acquired? How is moral knowledge put to use? Drawing on the work of Rawls and Chomsky, a framework for investigating -- is proposed. The framework is defended against a range of philosophical objections and contrasted with the approach of developmentalists like Piaget and Kohlberg. (...) ;One chapter consists of an interpretation of the analogy Rawls draws in A Theory of Justice between moral theory and generative linguistics. A second chapter clarifies the empirical significance of Rawls' linguistic analogy by formulating a solution to the problem of descriptive adequacy with respect to a class of commonsense moral intuitions, including those discussed in the trolley problem literature originating in the work of Foot and Thomson. Three remaining chapters defend Rawls' linguistic analogy against some of its critics. In response to Hare's objection that Rawls' conception of moral theory is too empirical and insufficiently normative, it is argued that Hare fails to acknowledge both the centrality of the problem of empirical adequacy in the history of moral philosophy and the complexity of Rawls' approach to the problem of normative adequacy. In response to Nagel's claim that the analogy between moral theory and linguistics is false because whatever native speakers agree on is English, but whatever ordinary men agree in condemning is not necessarily wrong, it is argued that the criticism ignores both Rawls' use of the competence-performance distinction and the theory-dependence of the corresponding distinction in linguistics. In response to Dworkin's claim that Rawls' conception of moral theory is incompatible with naturalism and presupposes constructivism, it is argued that Dworkin's distinction between naturalism and constructivism represents a false antithesis; neither is an accurate interpretation of the model of moral theory Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice. The thesis concludes by situating Rawls' linguistic analogy within the context of broader debates in metaethics, democratic theory, natural law theory, and the theory of moral development. (shrink)

When is it immoral to take advantage of another person for one's own benefit? For some, such as Ruth Sample, John Roemer, and Will Kymlicka, the answer at least partly depends on whether what one takes advantage of is the fact that this person is, or has been, the victim of injustice. I argue, however, that whether person A wrongly exploits person B is wholly unrelated to whether A takes advantage of the fact that B is, or was, the victim (...) of injustice. I also develop a positive account regarding which personal attributes one should not exploit for personal gain. (shrink)

Adequality, or παρισóτης (parisotēs) in the original Greek of Diophantus 1 , is a crucial step in Fermat’s method of finding maxima, minima, tangents, and solving other problems that a modern mathematician would solve using infinitesimal calculus. The method is presented in a series of short articles in Fermat’s collected works (1891, pp. 133–172). The first article, Methodus ad Disquirendam Maximam et Minimam 2 , opens with a summary of an algorithm for finding the maximum or minimum value of an (...) algebraic expression in a variable A. For convenience, we will write such an expression in modern functional notation as f (a). 3 The algorithm can be broken up into six steps in the following way:Introduce an auxiliary .. (shrink)

In this paper, the predicate counterparts, defined both axiomatically and semantically by means of Kripke frames, of the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ and their extensions are considered. It is proved that the set of semantical consequences on Kripke frames of every logic between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGL.3}$ or between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGrz.3}$ is $\Pi ^1_1$-hard even in languages with three (sometimes, two) individual variables, two (sometimes, one) unary predicate letters, and a single (...) proposition letter. As a corollary, it is proved that infinite families of modal predicate axiomatic systems, based on the classical first-order logic and the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ are not Kripke complete. Both $\Pi ^1_1$-hardness and Kripke incompleteness results of the paper do not depend on whether the logics contain the Barcan formula. (shrink)