The development of Russian culture predetermined three propensities which form the intellectual framework of Russian national philosophy—historicism, mysticism and aestheticism. The most significant conceptions of Russian philosophy, united by the idea and image of Sophia, are defined by this framework.There is no contradiction in Russian philosophy between rational and mystical modes of thought because they are complementary in this tradition. It is, however, necessary to redefine the conception of rationality.I would like to finish with Solovyov's words: “The idea of a (...) nation is not what it thinks of itself in time, but what God thinks of it in eternity”. (shrink)

The article considers the religious-philosophical anthropological paradigm in Soviet philosophy during the years of perestroika. It was during this period that Soviet idealist philosophers, forced to work under the conditions of a “scientific underground” for seven decades, first gained the right to participate legally in academic discussions. They substantiated the idea of man as a divine immortal being called to deification, restored, and approved in the official discourse the religious-philosophical anthropological model, either reinterpreting it according to the samples of Byzantine (...) patristics, or synthesizing it with oriental beliefs. The article reconstructs and analyzes the basic provisions of this paradigm: ideas about the origin of man, the relationship of soul and body, free will, the meaning and purpose of life, the relationship between the individual and society. It is concluded that the development of late Soviet religious and philosophical anthropological thought was determined by the tendency to self-isolation, associated with the actual refusal of its supporters from a constructive dialogue with adherents of materialistic teachings, and, consequently, the refusal to develop a synthesized concept of man. Adherents of the religious-philosophical approach expressed the hope that Christian anthropology would be taken as the basis for all philosophical developments of the future. However, contrary to their plans, this paradigm did not acquire a dominant position in modern Russian philosophy, and remained an object of interest for historians of philosophy and not for experts in philosophical anthropology and social philosophy. (shrink)

The paper examines the doctrine of understanding in Russian idealism from the late 19th to early 20th century. The author discusses the main ontological and epistemological concepts in the philosophy of V.S. Solovyov and his follower S.N. Trubetskoy. The paper offers a historical and philosophical reconstruction of the concept of understanding based on the analysis of V.S. Solovyov's Lectures on Divine Humanity and S.N. Trubetskoy's work On the Nature of Human Consciousness. According to Solovyov, the study of understanding is possible (...) if we presume an unconditional principle that premises being as the One. Based on this premise, it is demonstrated that the unconditional principle allows to know everything without having knowledge of each subject separately, and this, in turn, is understanding process. Trubetskoy's theory of understanding is premised on the concept of soborny mind, which defines mind as joint knowledge about all spheres of existence. The article shows that the main position shared by the Russian thinkers is the unconditional principle serving as the basis for life and mind without which the existence of either the universal or the particular is impossible. The author concludes that such a principle is a cognitive relation to the world, which unconditionality is the condition for understanding the reality as indivisible. Understanding, as presented by V.S. Solovyov and S.N. Trubetskoy, is the true understanding of the unity of existence in all its manifestations, that is, a synthesis of the sensual, rational, moral, and aesthetic. (shrink)

A necessary condition for the development of a philosophical culture is the possession of a history of philosophy that conserves the experience of posing and discussing philosophical problems. Apologetics, dogmatism, a rigid devotion to the class approach, and ignoring universal human values for a long time dominated our social science and substantially deformed the way the history of philosophy was taught, giving rise to a number of stereotypes that hinder the revival of the skills of a culture of professional philosophizing. (...) The purpose of the present article is to draw the attention of philosophers to the problem of presenting material on the history of philosophy in a philosophy course. (shrink)

A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology presents for the first time in English key passages from the Summa Halensis, one of the first major installments in the summa genre for which scholasticism became famous. This systematic work of philosophy and theology was collaboratively written mostly between 1236 and 1245 by the founding members of the Franciscan school, such as Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, who worked at the recently founded University of Paris. Modern scholarship has often dismissed (...) this early Franciscan intellectual tradition as unoriginal, merely systematizing the Augustinian tradition in light of the rediscovery of Aristotle, paving the way for truly revolutionary figures like John Duns Scotus. But as the selections in this reader show, it was this earlier generation that initiated this break with precedent. The compilers of the Summa Halensis first articulated many positions that eventually become closely associated with the Franciscan tradition on issues like the nature of God, the proof for God’s existence, free will, the transcendentals, and Christology. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the ways in which medieval thinkers employed philosophical concepts in a theological context as well as the evolution of Franciscan thought and its legacy to modernity. A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology is available from the publisher on an open-access basis. (shrink)

The authors investigated the relevance of consequentialism in commercial space exploration as well as in the actively developing space market. The authors conclude that space expansion and colonization of space objects will lead to a revision of the foundational consequentialism provisions. Consequentialism, formed during the history of terrestrial civilization, loses its effectiveness under conditions of space commercialization. The basics of planetary thinking are different from those of cosmic thinking. Therefore, considering the meaning of the terms “cosmic expansion” and “colonization of (...) the cosmos” through the existing theory of consequentialism faces serious contradictions. There is a range of problems that are not explored in modern philosophy and ethics due to the lack of an empirical basis for philosophical analysis. (shrink)

RESUMO No artigo, apresenta-se um panorama da vida e da obra do professor, filólogo e cientista russo N. Vassíliev, com ênfase em sua contribuição para os estudos bakhtinianos internacionais. A longa convivência e parceria dos autores com N. Vassíliev permite-lhes não só desenhar o perfil de um pesquisador sério das humanidades, mas também mostrar seu mundo de paixões pessoais e o papel de sua biografia na escolha do núcleo de suas pesquisas científicas: a problemática dos estudos bakhtinianos. Dedica-se atenção especial (...) às soluções propostas por ele ao problema dos textos disputados. ABSTRACT The article presents an overview of the life and works of the Russian scholar, philologist Professor Nikolay Vasiliev and the assessment of his contribution to international Bakhtin studies. For many years the authors have communicated and cooperated with N. Vasiliev during the long years that give them the opportunity not only to create a portrait of this serious researcher, but also to show the world his hobbies, how his biography influenced on the choice of the issue of Bakhtin studies as a central topic for his research. Special attention is paid to his proposed solutions to the problem of disputed texts. (shrink)

Review of Marion, J.-L.. Questions cartésiennes III: Descartes sous le masque du cartésianisme. Paris: PUF.

The authors investigated the relevance of consequentialism in commercial space exploration as well as in the actively developing space market. The authors conclude that space expansion and colonization of space objects will lead to a revision of the foundational consequentialism provisions. Consequentialism, formed during the history of terrestrial civilization, loses its effectiveness under conditions of space commercialization. The basics of planetary thinking are different from those of cosmic thinking. Therefore, considering the meaning of the terms “cosmic expansion” and “colonization of (...) the cosmos” through the existing theory of consequentialism faces serious contradictions. There is a range of problems that are not explored in modern philosophy and ethics due to the lack of an empirical basis for philosophical analysis. (shrink)

We propose that a top priority of the cerebral cortex must be the discovery and explicit representation of the environmental variables that contribute as major factors to environmental regularities. Any neural representation in which such variables are represented only implicitly (thus requiring extra computing to use them) will make the regularities more complex and therefore more difficult, if not impossible, to learn. The task of discovering such important environmental variables is not an easy one, since their existence is only indirectly (...) suggested by the sensory input patterns the cortex receives – these variables are “hidden.” We present a candidate computational strategy for (1) discovering regularity-simplifying environmental variables, (2) learning the regularities, and (3) using regularities in perceptual and decision-making tasks. The SINBAD computational model discovers useful environmental variables through a search for different, but nevertheless highly correlated functions of any kind over non-overlapping subsets of the known variables, this being indicative of some important environmental variable that is responsible for the correlation. We suggest that such a search is performed in the neocortex by the dendritic trees of individual pyramidal cells. According to the SINBAD model, the basic function of each pyramidal cell is (1) to discover and represent one of the regularity-simplifying environmental variables, and (2) to learn to infer the state of its variable from the states of other variables, represented by other pyramidal cells. A network of such cells – each cell just attending to representation of its variable – can function as a sophisticated and useful inferential model of the outside world. (shrink)

The ability to predict is the most importantability of the brain. Somehow, the cortex isable to extract regularities from theenvironment and use those regularities as abasis for prediction. This is a most remarkableskill, considering that behaviourallysignificant environmental regularities are noteasy to discern: they operate not only betweenpairs of simple environmental conditions, astraditional associationism has assumed, butamong complex functions of conditions that areorders of complexity removed from raw sensoryinputs. We propose that the brain's basicmechanism for discovering such complexregularities is implemented in (...) the dendritictrees of individual pyramidal cells in thecerebral cortex. Pyramidal cells have 5–8principal dendrites, each of which is capableof learning nonlinear input-to-outputtransfer functions. We propose that eachdendrite is trained, in learning its transferfunction, by all the other principal dendritesof the same cell. These dendrites teach eachother to respond to their separate inputs with matching outputs. Exposed to differentbut related information about the sensoryenvironment, principal dendrites of the samecell tune to functions over environmentalconditions that, while different, are correlated . As a result, the cell as awhole tunes to the source of the regularitiesdiscovered by the cooperating dendrites,creating a new representation. When organizedinto feed-forward/feedback layers, pyramidalcells can build their discoveries on thediscoveries of other cells, graduallyuncovering nature's hidden order. Theresulting associative network is powerfulenough to meet a troubling traditionalobjection to associationism: that it is toosimple an architecture to implement rationalprocesses. (shrink)

We consider relational databases organized over an ordered domain with some additional relations — a typical example is the ordered domain of rational numbers together with the operation of addition. In the focus of our study are the first-order queries that are invariant under order-preserving “permutations” — such queries are called order-generic. It has recently been discovered that for some domains order-generic FO queries fail to express more than pure order queries. For example, every order-generic FO query over rational numbers (...) with + can be rewritten without +. For some other domains, however, this is not the case.We provide very general conditions on the FO theory of the domain that ensure the collapse of order-generic extended FO queries to pure order queries over this domain: the Pseudo-finite Homogeneity Property and a stronger Isolation Property. We further distinguish one broad class of domains satisfying the Isolation Property, the so-called quasi-o-minimal domains. This class includes all the o-minimal domains, but also the ordered group of integer numbers and the ordered semigroup of natural numbers, and some other domains.An important difference of this paper from the recent series of related papers is that we generalize all the notions to the case of finitely representable database states — as opposed to finite states — and develop a general lifting technique that, essentially, allows us to extend any result of the kind we are interested in, from finite to finitely representable states. We show, however, that these results cannot be transfered to arbitrary infinite states. (shrink)

Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Oleg Tarnopolsky, Marina Kabanova The article analyzes using Content and Language Integrated Learning for teaching one of the optional humanities disciplines to Ukrainian university students of different majors. The discipline discussed in the article as an example of using CLIL methodology is “The Fundamentals of Psychology and Pedagogy” and it is in the list of optional humanities subjects for the first-year students of Alfred (...) Nobel University in Dnipro, Ukraine. However, unlike the other optional humanities disciplines, the methodology underlying this course is based on teaching the subject in English, instead of Ukrainian, following the CLIL approach widely used in the European education but still little known in Ukraine. The purpose of the paper is to expose and analyze the original methodology developed that conditioned the specific structure of the relevant course, and the specific learning activities used in it. The essence of the developed CLIL theory-based methodology and its practical application are manifested through learning activities that include students’ mini-lectures/workshop-type presentations, brainstorming, case-studies, discussions, and a learning project with its results summarized in students’ essays, abstracts, and summaries written in English. The students collect the information required for completing their tasks not only from the teacher’s lectures and the recommended literature but also by way of doing extensive Internet-search on psychological and pedagogical sites in English. All this makes CLIL in the case under discussion experiential-interactive, blended, autonomous, and cooperative. As the result, students mostly self-construct their knowledge of the discipline by way of using the target language as the tool for such self-construction. This makes the elaborated course a clear-cut case of constructivism in CLIL pedagogy. Subject Classification Numbers: PACS 01.40.-d. (shrink)

The modern Lithuanian legal doctrine recognises that criminal liability is a last resort (ultima ratio) protecting the society from various law violations. This idea has got deep roots in criminology and is obviously based on the position of rational approach towards the state criminal policy. However, it is not clear whether it is of obligatory legal status to the legislature and the courts. This article attempts to present the idea of a last resort as a concept based on the constitutional (...) principles of the rule of law, justice, proportionality and rationality in the legislation and case law. The author concludes that the main precursors of the ultima ratio principle are the German legal doctrine of protection of legal goods (Rechtsgüterschutz) and Harm principle respected in the common law tradition, as well as the need for protection of human rights in the democratic world. These concepts raise the duty of the legislator to justify the act of criminalisation by legitimate purpose and to comply with certain constitutional limits of application of criminal law. The idea of criminal liability as a last resort is recognised both in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court (obiter dictum) and in the practice of the Supreme Court of Lithuania reasoning particular decisions in criminal cases, especially delimiting criminal and other types of legal liability. The author concludes that the fact of discrepancy of criminal law to ultima ratio test can be one of the arguments in support of its objection to the Constitution and even the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. At the same time, the author of the article has found that many norms of the Criminal Code are in conflict with the idea of a last resort. (shrink)

Publication date: 30 August 2017 Source: Author: Oleg Tarnopolsky This paper analyzes a project devoted to elaborating a new textbook of English for students majoring in “Tourism.” The textbook is designed on the basis of the constructivist approach, i.e. such an organization of the teaching/learning process that ensures students’ involuntary language acquisition through participation in target language communication which is implemented when performing learning tasks modeling the professional activities of the future university graduates. Those tasks are completed in the (...) form of experiential learning activities that provide for modeling the students’ future professional activities and professional target language communication, giving them opportunities of acquiring the language involuntarily through practical experience of participating in such communication. Examples of experiential learning activities are given – those that are used in every unit of the textbook as organized in the separate parts of every such unit. (shrink)

In many films, story is presented in an order different from chronological. Deviations from the chronological order in a narrative are called anachronies. Narratological theory and the evidence from psychological experiments indicate that anachronies allow stories to be more interesting, as the non-chronological order evokes curiosity in viewers. In this paper we investigate the historical dynamics in the use of anachronies in film. Particularly, we follow the cultural attraction theory that suggests that, given certain conditions, cultural evolution should conform to (...) our cognitive preferences. We study this on a corpus of 80 most popular mystery films released in 1970–2009. We observe that anachronies have become used more frequently, and in a greater proportion of films. We also find that films that made substantial use of anachronies, on average, distributed the anachronies evenly along film length, while the films that made little use of anachronies placed them near the beginning and end. We argue that this can reflect a functional difference between these two types of using anachronies. The paper adds further support to the argument that popular culture may be influenced to a significant degree by our cognitive biases. (shrink)

The paper consists of brief literature review of fundamentals and ways of the Russian approach to the studying of the doctrine of love in Latin Patristic IV-V centuries. This topic is peripheral theme for the Russian science; however, it has some development. The literature review describes the most popular ideas and the reasons for their choice.

The article presents results of an ongoing study of centers of intellectual innovations in post-Soviet Russia. Using the European University at St. Petersburg as the main object of their analysis, the authors demonstrate how new models of academic careers, which became available in the 1980s and 1990s, were eventually institutionalized as new models of knowledge production and educational practices. Supported by American foundations, this private university had to invent a new institutional structure and to position itself within the field of (...) higher education, still mostly dominated by the state. (shrink)

The article discusses the current topic of international interuniversity exchanges in the field of theater education. The subject of the study is the interaction of theater schools in Russia and China within the framework of the experimental Russian–Chinese theater and educational project of the Central Academy of Drama and the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts. The project has been implemented since 2015. According to the terms of the project, Russian and Chinese teachers of acting and special disciplines work together (...) in St. Petersburg and Beijing. Upon graduation, students receive diplomas from two universities recognized in both countries. The author, a direct participant of the project, analyzes the results of this experiment from the position of compliance with the principles and requirements of the dialogue of cultures.  The novelty of the research lies in the substantiation of the cultural value, the prospects of the modern version of the interaction of theater schools in Russia and China. The results of the study were the following conclusions: in the implementation of the Russian-Chinese theater and educational project, all the basic conditions are present and fulfilled, which make it possible to determine the events, events and their results that took place within the framework of the project as a full-fledged dialogue of cultures. Today, as never before, there are points of contact and mutual enrichment of the cultures of Russia and China. There are mutually significant cultural ties, dialogue and interaction of cultures. This variant of intercultural interaction is also productive from the point of view of innovation, creating a unique field of cross-cultural experiments. (shrink)

Monitoring of microseismic emissions for periods of 10–30 days has established a clear relationship between solid earth tides and microseismic activity. In addition, an event magnitude versus recurrence relationship has been established that can be used to predict oil, gas, or water content of open fractures in imaged rock volumes. Originally developed to explore for oil and gas, the detection technology used has been applied in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Texas. When visualized in three dimensions at scales of several (...) kilometers on a side, including depth, the observations shows systems of subvertical fracture volumes distributed as clusters in the subsurface. When visualized in sequential time windows, microseismic activity can be seen to respond in detail to lunar-solar gravitational changes. The seismic imaging technology used to detect the location and temporal changes within these fracture systems is based on deploying geophone receiver arrays using array patterns and processing algorithms similar to those used in phased array radar in the electromagnetic spectrum. This passive listening technology has been termed seismic location of emission centers. Examples of applied SLEC monitoring are presented for surveys performed in Russia and Texas. (shrink)

A well-known psychologist O. Asmolov speaks of a paradox of system thinking that touches such concepts as "element in the system" and "system in the element", "person in society" and "society in person". The formal logic does not fit the fact that the "person", as an element of the "social system", can not only accommodate the "social system", but potentially can lead to its changes.

For a quasi variety of algebras K, the Higman Theorem is said to be true if every recursively presented K-algebra is embeddable into a finitely presented K-algebra; the Generalized Higman Theorem is said to be true if any K-algebra which is recursively presented over its finitely generated subalgebra is embeddable into a K-algebra which is finitely presented over this subalgebra. We suggest certain general conditions on K under which the Higman Theorem implies the Generalized Higman Theorem; a finitely generated K-algebra (...) A is embeddable into every existentially closed K-algebra containing a finitely generated K-algebra B if and only if the word problem for A is Q-reducible to the word problem for B. The quasi varieties of groups, torsion-free groups, and semigroups satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

The relevance of the research reflects the unity of the requirements of the Beijing Philosophical Congress "Learning to be a man" and the anniversary report of the "Rome Club" "Come On! Capitalism, myopia, population and destruction of the planet", which the transformation processes of the socio-sphere are revealed from the standpoint the need for a radical breakdown of the spiritual and moral world of man and his worldview. The foundation of these transformations is the transition in education, as the hippocrine (...) of our knowledge, the source that quenches thirst in them to the "new Enlightenment" as a decisive factor in the learning of a person to be him. This determined the purpose and objectives of the article. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the natural and necessary character of the formation of the "new Enlightenment", to reveal the architectonics of its content. Research objectives : in the context of the goal to uncover the factors that determine the need for a transition in education to the "new Enlightenment", its qualitative difference from the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries; to characterize the new content of "connectedness" in education based on the use of new information technologies; analyze the process of formation of a new spiritual and moral outlook of a specialist on the universal values of humanity; focus the learner’s attention on focusing knowledge of sustainable development as a determining factor of the global problems of mankind through the interrelation of academic disciplines; an important component presents the demand for the formation of a new integral thinking, innovative in its essence and qualitatively different from the analytical one. It is noted that the transition to the path of integral thinking contributes to the connection, coordination and organization into a single whole of the fragments of the object under study. Such thinking is characterized by stability, reliability, variability; it is original in its connections with science and education, and methodological influence on individual and social consciousness. Integral thinking reflects a qualitatively new level of intelligence. Research methods: to achieve the stated goal and constructive solution of the tasks, the article used the method of abduction, analysis and synthesis, historical and logical, synergistic approach. The results of the research: a new paradigm of education is represented – the noospheric-information one corresponding to the factuality of the “new Enlightenment”, as its ability to reproduce itself on a changing scale. The change in the scale of the socio-sphere is due to its globalization processes. The content of the “new Enlightenment” is explicated as a qualitatively new level of formation of students' sustainable knowledge based on the integral innovative type of thinking based on the information resources of society, the use of modern educational technologies, as well as on the values of society, as the quintessence of its wisdom and public intelligence. Conclusions. Thus, the formation of a "new Enlightenment" is natural and necessary. This follows from the requirements of the “learn to be human” program, as well as from the development of an internally ordered education process. “New Enlightenment” also has an attribute of uniqueness, since it does not have anything to compare with, identify; it is an objective, essential, unique phenomenon; it is single, relative, determined by the previous development of education. It is based on the processes of intellectualization, innovation, informational content, humanism and is capable of solving constructively the tasks facing society. (shrink)

Intentionality, mental representation, sensory perception and its reliability, sensory illusions, and the concomitant issue of epistemological skepticism are becoming an important cluster of related topics in research on medieval cognitive psychology. It is no wonder, because these topics are much more relevant to present-day discussions of cognition and sensory perception, as many of these issues remain unexplained to this date, and therefore any observations in these areas could still be of interest, while many other topics traditionally discussed in studies on (...) medieval philosophy have only historical value and gradually fade into oblivion. Although the two publications included in this review are not... (shrink)

Statistical physics cannot explain why a thermodynamic arrow of time exists, unless one postulates very special and unnatural initial conditions. Yet, we argue that statistical physics can explain why the thermodynamic arrow of time is universal, i.e., why the arrow points in the same direction everywhere. Namely, if two subsystems have opposite arrow-directions at a particular time, the interaction between them makes the configuration statistically unstable and causes a decay towards a system with a universal direction of the arrow of (...) time. We present general qualitative arguments for that claim and support them by a detailed analysis of a toy model based on the baker’s map. (shrink)

The relevance of the chosen direction of research is that e-learning at the present stage of development of society is one of the most popular forms of organization of the educational process. This primarily applies to vocational and postgraduate education. Its main advantage is that it focuses on creating a barrier-free learning environment, ensuring the availability of quality education without separation from work and family and regardless of the place of residence. The article analyzes the features of updating the education (...) system in the postmodern era and the urgent problems of the education system that need to be addressed. Features of e-learning as a means of meeting the demand for educational services, its advantages and disadvantages are characterized. The peculiarities of functioning of open educational resources as prospects of e-learning development are analyzed. Continuation of the initiated research is to study the specific characteristics of mobile learning as one of the possible options for e-learning. (shrink)

Filtration combustion is described by Laplacian growth without surface tension. These equations have elegant analytical solutions that replace the complex integro-differential motion equations by simple differential equations of pole motion in a complex plane. The main problem with such a solution is the existence of finite time singularities. To prevent such singularities, nonzero surface tension is usually used. However, nonzero surface tension does not exist in filtration combustion, and this destroys the analytical solutions. However, a more elegant approach exists for (...) solving the problem. First, we can introduce a small amount of pole noise to the system. Second, for regularisation of the problem, we throw out all new poles that can produce a finite time singularity. It can be strictly proved that the asymptotic solution for such a system is a single finger. Moreover, the qualitative consideration demonstrates that a finger with 1 2 of the channel width is statistically stable. Therefore, all properties of such a solution are exactly the same as those of the solution with nonzero surface tension under numerical noise. The solution of the ST problem without surface tension is similar to the solution for the equation of cellular flames in the case of the combustion of gas mixtures. (shrink)