This volume brings together the primary challenges for 21st century cognitive sciences and cultural neuroscience in responding to the nature of human identity, self, and evolution of life itself. Through chapters devoted to intricate but focused models, empirical findings, theories, and experiential data, the contributors reflect upon the most exciting possibilities, and debate upon the fundamental aspects of consciousness and self in the context of cultural, philosophical, and multidisciplinary divergences and convergences. Such an understanding and the ensuing insights lie in (...) the cusp of philosophy, neurosciences, psychiatry, and medical humanities. In this volume, the editors and contributors explore the foundations of human thinking and being and discuss both evolutionary/cultural embeddedness, and the self-orientation, of consciousness, keeping in mind questions that bring in the interdisciplinary complexity of issues such as the emergence of consciousness, relation between healing and agency, models of altered self, how cognition impacts the social self, experiential primacy as the hallmark of consciousness, and alternate epistemologies to understand these interdisciplinary puzzles. (shrink)

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González enshrined the “right to forget” in the jurisprudence of the European Union. The judgment caused concern to transparency and open information advocates in terms of pitting a right to forget against the general right of the public to know. This, as this paper will argue, is a false distinction. The Internet is, and has always been, a regulated space. Nor (...) is the right to free expression, even in its American form, absolute. While there are genuine concerns about how the balance is struck, evolving practice is likely to identify what cases deserve deletion, to those that do not. The biggest challenge lies in how, and who, tests that balance as to what is removed from the search engines of the Internet. Finding material is important but forgetting may be just as vital to liberties as well. (shrink)

The research is devoted to justification of the interdisciplinary approach in the study of consciousness. Studying consciousness as a phenomenon is a very divergent project, the mystery of its nature and appearance makes different ways of studying consciousness possible. Besides, consciousness is an umbrella term which may be interpreted differently in different contexts. Various approaches to comprehension of consciousness have been developed nowadays in Philosophy, Psychology, Biology, Medicine, Neurosciences, Sociology, Cognitive and Computer Sciences, Linguistics and a number of other research (...) fields. In the end of the 1980s one can notice an exceptional growth of interest in the problem of consciousness both in Philosophy and Science. The works by Bernard Baars, Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick and Christopher Koch, David Chalmers have appeared in these years. They outlined the main approaches to the study of consciousness and demonstrated that study of consciousness became an interdisciplinarity research. The research discusses the features of the phenomenon of consciousness and outlines the main theoretical issues, the most relevant of which are the “hard problem” of consciousness, the problem of mind and body, the problem of “the explanatory gap”, the question of the primacy of the brain in relation to consciousness, the place of consciousness in the modern scientific paradigm, changes of the ethical and worldview interpretation in connection with artificial intelligence, neurochips and neural network. Based on the complexity and multidimensionality of the research field associated with the problem of consciousness, the variety of approaches to studying this problem in Philosophy and Science, the controversial character of the questions raised, and the heated discussion among researches, the author concludes that interdisciplinary studies of consciousness have the greatest heuristic possibilities today. (shrink)

Dans ce texte de Tchaïanov daté de l’été 1917, qu’une traduction partielle rend ici pour la première fois accessible au lectorat francophone, l’agronome, économiste et spécialiste de l’économie paysanne russe défend un collectivisme fondé sur l’idée d’une résistance de la paysannerie au développement du capitalisme. Ce texte a joué un rôle décisif à la fois dans la polarisation des débats sur le collectivisme en Russie à partir de 1917 et dans l’histoire des réceptions du marxisme dans la sociologie rurale tout (...) au long du XX e siècle. En fondant certaines thèses populistes sur des études empiriques de la situation russe, Tchaïanov a permis le développement d’un « néo-narodnisme écologique » dans les sciences sociales à partir des années 1960. (shrink)

The study presents the Russian historical-philosophical process in the context of the discovery of a new object, themes, personae, set of reactions and formation of a product for the intellectual community. The author's reliance on philosophical empirical material and appropriate hermeneutics in its processing allows the author to highlight those factors that influenced individual and collective reception. The author sees as a convenient case study the “discovery” by the Russian philosophical community of the early 20th century of both American philosophy (...) in general and C.S. Peirce in particular. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Russian thinkers have turned their attention to American philosophy in all the diversity of its manifestations. Russian intellectuals paid special attention to American pragmatism and everything associated with it. In Russia, in addition to translations, numerous reviews of foreign publications on this topic are appearing. Of particular interest to us in the Russian “collective reflection” of American ideas is the system of preferences for ideas, texts, events, and names. The point is that what might have been a priority for a European thinker, for a Russian one turned out to be on the “periphery” of his consciousness, as well as vice versa. While James appeared among the priority figures for Russian thinkers, Peirce was in his “shadow”. Using rich empirical material, the author shows all the stages of Peirce’s image formation in the Russian intellectual community. The research shows that “image” of Peirce, which represents not so much the thinker himself, but characterizes the intellectual community that turned to him. The results of the study may be useful both for contemporary foreign and Russian interpreters of Peirce and for historians of philosophy who are rethinking the past and forming in the present new objects of reception and reflection. (shrink)

Russkai︠a︡ t︠erkovʹ i drugie statʹi -- V temnykh religioznykh luchakh.

This set reprints volumes that were orginally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. in 1953. Landmark volumes at the time of their original publication, these titles do not merely expound the theoretical constructions of Russian philosophers, but also relate these constructions to the general conditions of Russian life. Volume One examines the historical conditions of the development of philosophy in Russia and explores the general features of Russian philosophy. It also surveys the principal works on the history of Russian (...) philosophy. Volume Two includes biographies and examination of the themes of the following philosophers; Vladimir Solovyov, V.D. Kudryavtsev, N.F. Fyodorov and Later Hegelians such as Chicherin, Debolski and Bakunin. This volume also provides analysis of various schools of thought in Russian philosophy in the twentieth century, for example; Neo-Leibzianism, Modern Positivism and New-Marxism to name but a few. (shrink)

Along with other definitions, the XX century is also called a century of domination of ideologies, which almost always considered a person as a means to establish one or another type of domination: either national, or class, or bureaucratic. Any but mandatory one that would resist human freedom, and therefore - justice. Ideology exits a person to think freely and make informed decisions. She wants to accustom her to adapt humbly to the existing political and economic conditions, to form a (...) superficial perception of the propagandized reality of the best and the unchangeable. The ideology of totalitarianism seeks to turn a person into a "social dream," self-sacrificed, and a satisfied citizen of every kind, indifferent to spiritual demands. (shrink)

One of the most persistent and popular bourgeois myths about Spinoza is that of his unwillingness to participate in any kind of political struggle whatever. This myth is sustained particularly by those non-Marxist historians of philosophy who contend that the essence of Spinozism is the development of a new form of religiosity, free of the limitations of any national religion. Such a conception of the Dutch thinker is partially based on facts related by his first biographers, particularly Lucas. As we (...) know, Lucas, in his Life of Benedict Spinoza, written in French between 1678 and 1688, writes that the philosopher's father, Michael de Spinoza, lacking funds and being unable to establish his son in commerce, chose for him the career of a rabbi, and with this in mind placed the young Spinoza in the Amsterdam kheder, where he gained an excellent knowledge of classical Hebrew and studied to perfection the Old Testament and the considerably more voluminous Talmud. Even during his period of instruction, Spinoza, having found many contradictions in the Bible and Talmud, placed the rabbis who were his teachers in untenable positions and this subsequently led to a conflict between him and the leadership of the Amsterdam Jewish community. This report by Spinoza's first biographer suggests the idea that the young Spinoza had crystallized his ideas as early as his stay in the kheder. This we find stated in many of the non-Marxist studies devoted to him. Soviet writings on Spinoza also usually repeat Lucas' view entirely without criticism . However, certain foreign researches of recent decades, which have given consideration to documents and firsthand reports published in 1932 by the Dutch researcher Vaz Dias and, more recently, certain other documents have necessitated considerable corrections in the biographies both by Lucas and Colerus. In these works — of which the book by the French researcher Madeleine Francés, Spinoza dans les pays Neerlandais de la seconde moitié du XVII siècle, Vol. I, Paris, 1937, and that of the American researcher, Lewis Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, Boston, 1958, are particularly worthy of mention — serious attempts are made to demonstrate the social roots and essence of Spinozism. The biographical data presented in these works contribute to a clarification of the real reasons for the conflict between the young Spinoza and the leadership of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. According to these writers, Spinoza's father was a wealthy man and, in all probability, did not intend to make a rabbi of his son. There can be no question that the young Spinoza attended the elementary classes of the Jewish school, but his name is not found in the lists of students in its higher grades, from which future rabbis emerged. Beginning approximately at the age of thirteen, Bento helped his father in his commercial and financial operations. However, after his father's death, Baruch himself took charge of these matters during the period 1654-1656 and, as these documents suggest, demonstrated considerable skill in commercial and financial affairs. However, the activities of merchant and financier did not appeal to the young man. The discrepancy between his intellectual interests and the nature of his occupation proved so irreconcilable that the future philosopher, who had established numerous scholarly and personal ties outside the Jewish community, drifted farther and farther both from his business and the community, until finally he was excommunicated, and broke with the community. (shrink)