Nikolaj Fëdorov insists that the proper end of the philosophical project must be the repudiation of history in the creation of a new being not subject to death. This project appears to be an extension of the kind of philosophical madness one might associate with the Platonic striving for synoptic vision of the whole. Federov develops this notion of philosophy, not in dialogue with Plato, however, as much as with the Hegelian notion of the end of human striving in absolute (...) knowledge, the final unity of will and reason, which Fëdorov criticizes. The exceptional radicality of Fëdorov’s philosophical project as a project of divinization, as well as its flaws, are most clearly manifest in the Russian context with reference to two other crucial projects of divinization deeply influenced by Hegel: that of Vladimir Solov’ëv and Alexandre Kojève. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and (...) spiritual context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

The five selections in this issue deal with some of the most important and widely known Russian religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. Although this is not pointed out in any of the selections, it is an interesting fact that some of these thinkers were personally acquainted and discussed their ideas with each other. In the last few years of his life Fedor Dostoevsky was friends with young Vladimir Solov'ev and they discussed not only their own ideas but also (...) those of Nikolai Fedorov. Although Fedorov had not published anything on his project of resurrection, both Solov'ev and Lev Tolstoy were well acquainted with his ideas through conversations with him at the Rumiantsev library, where Fedorov served as a librarian. They disagreed on basic issues and their discussions helped to define the differences between them. Some of the differences are mentioned in our selections. (shrink)

We prove, in ZFC,the existence of a definable, countably saturated elementary extension of the reals.

We prove that in the Solovay model, every OD equivalence relation, E, over the reals, either admits an OD reduction to the equality relation on the set of all countable (of length $ ) binary sequences, or continuously embeds E 0 , the Vitali equivalence. If E is a Σ 1 1 (resp. Σ 1 2 ) relation then the reduction above can be chosen in the class of all ▵ 1 (resp. ▵ 2 ) functions. The proofs are based (...) on a topology generated by OD sets. (shrink)

Russian Orthodoxy during the twentieth century presented a rich and varied body of thought about the nature of humanity and the human condition. This article surveys the major thinkers within this tradition, beginning with its background in the Slavophile movement and culminating in the work of more recent Orthodox thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, and Alexander Schmemann.

“Toy worlds” involving actions, such as the blocks world and the Missionaries and Cannibals puzzle, are often used by researchers in the areas of commonsense reasoning and planning to illustrate and test their ideas. We would like to create a database of generalpurpose knowledge about actions that encodes common features of many action domains of this kind, in the same way as abstract algebra and topology represent common features of specific number systems. This paper is a report on the first (...) stage of this project—the design of an action description language in which this database will be written. The new language is an extension of the action language C+. Its main distinctive feature is the possibility of referring to other action descriptions in the definition of a new action domain. (shrink)

This is a review of Teresa Obolevitch's Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought, which provides an intellectual history of the collaboration between fides and ratio in the course of the development of Russian thought, from its Byzantine origins to the twenty-first century. Obolevitch examines various approaches to combining faith and science in such eighteenth-century thinkers as Mikhail Lomonosov and Gregory Skovoroda, the nineteenth-century thinkers Victor Kudryavtsev-Platonov, Dimitrii Golubinsky, Sergei Glagolev, the Schellingian Peter Chaadaev, the Slavophiles Alexei Khomyakov and Ivan (...) Kireevsky, the writers Fedor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, the twentieth-century philosophers Nikolai Lossky, Pavel Florensky, Semen Frank, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Sergius Bulgakov, Alexei Losev, the Russian Cosmists Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky, and the Orthodox priest Georges Florovsky. The book ends with considerations on the Neo-Patristic synthesis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the present review, I situate the book in the context of the author's works, I summarize it, editorializing occasionally, and I discuss the thesis of the book in the wider context of world religions. (shrink)

In this paper we summarise the constraints that low-redshift data—such as supernovae Ia, baryon acoustic oscillations and cosmic chronometers —are able to set on the concordance model and its extensions, as well as on inhomogeneous but isotropic models. We provide a broad overlook into these cosmological scenarios and several aspects of data analysis. In particular, we review a number of systematic issues of SN Ia analysis that include magnitude correction techniques, selection bias and their influence on the inferred cosmological constraints. (...) Furthermore, we examine the isotropic and anisotropic components of the BAO data and their individual relevance for cosmological model-fitting. We extend the discussion presented in earlier works regarding the inferred dynamics of cosmic expansion and its present rate from the low-redshift data. Specifically, we discuss the cosmological constraints on the accelerated expansion and related model-selections. In addition, we extensively talk about the Hubble constant problem, then focus on the low-redshift data constraint on \ that is based on CC. Finally, we present the way in which this result compares to the high-redshift \ estimate and local measurements that are in tension. (shrink)

The author examines the key philosophical problem of theodicy and freedom as it was first formulated by Fyodor Dostoevsky and later developed by Nikolai Berdyaev.

We consider games over a finite alphabet with Gurevich-Harrington's winning conditions and restraints as in Yakhnis-Yakhnis . The game tree, the Gurevich-Harrington's kernels of the winning condition and the restraints are defined by finite automata. We give an effective criterion to determine the winning player and an effective presentation of a class of finite automata defined winning strategies.Our approach yields an alternative solution to the games considered by Büchi and Landweber . The BL algorithm is an important tool for solving (...) effectively presented games. The differences between the BL and our algorithms are as follows. Our algorithm is uniformly applicable to winning sets that correspond to boolean combinations of BL winning conditions, while the BL algorithm requires a transformation of such boolean combinations into a single BL condition. Our algorithm directly applies to a larger class of game trees for a given game alphabet than does the BL one. We describe Büchi-Landweber's class of winning conditions in a more transparent way by using finite automata and Gurevich-Harrington's form of winning conditions. Our algorithms that determine the winner of the game and find a winning strategy, are based on a translation of the events in the game in terms of the transition table of the automaton representing the game. This automaton differs from the ones that represent BL winning conditions. Both algorithms need further investigation.The algorithm determining the winner in the game, can be used as a verifier of concurrent programs. This is because programs can be viewed as strategies in Gurevich-Harrington's games and program specifications could be regarded as winning conditions for such games. The algorithm which finds a winning strategy could be used as a basis for automated concurrent program design.The present paper is a sequel to Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 48 277–297. (shrink)

This study focuses on determining whether violent contexts influence the perception of aggressiveness in faces analysing spontaneous corrugator supercilii activity. Participants viewed pictures of...

As variants of the Christian tradition have emerged through the centuries they have given rise to distinct versions of Christian metaphysics with divergent cosmological commitments. In the early Church, the Cappodocian fathers constructed a theological framework which focuses on the “personal” nature of reality. The personal nature of reality is central not only to understanding key theological doctrines, such as the Trinity, but also the cosmos itself. This essay explores the Cappodocian conception of the cosmos as personal both in its (...) origin and as a medium for an interpersonal relationship between God and creatures. (shrink)

Felicitous models were defined by Kit Fine in 1987 for the purpose of describing the semantics of negation in the programming language Prolog. They are often referred to as stable models, or answer sets. Years later, sophisticated software systems for generating answer sets were designed, and they became the basis of a new programming paradigm, called answer set programming. That programming method is used now for solving computational problems in many areas of science and technology. This chapter traces the early (...) history of felicitous models and the ways in which that idea contributed to computer science. (shrink)

En el presente escrito se intentará mostrar algunos desafíos que el mundo contemporáneo pone a la educación bajo el influjo de la globalización, procesos que afectan muchos ámbitos del pensar y del actuar humano. Expone una serie de conceptualizaciones sobre dicho tema e invita al análisis serio de ese fenómeno por sus implicaciones sociales.

This paper is motivated by the idea of interaction between two directions of research in knowledge representation: the design of action description languages and the development of libraries of reusable, general-purpose knowledge components. Writing an action description that characterizes actions in terms of their effects, as common today, can be compared to writing a program that does not use standard subroutines. We conjecture that a library of standard descriptions for a number of “basic” actions can facilitate writing, understanding and modifying (...) action descriptions. In this paper, we take some steps towards determining how such a library, written in the action language C+, can be used. When using an instance of a library action description, we relate the library constants to the domain-specific constants by providing definitions. Therefore, a theory of explicit definitions in C+ is developed. To illustrate the use of the library, we show how the action PushBox in the Monkey and Bananas domain can be described as a special case of the “library action” Move. (shrink)

The language of nonmonotonic causal theories, defined by Norman McCain and Hudson Turner, is an important formalism for representing properties of actions. For causal theories of a special kind, called definite, a simple translation into the language of logic programs under the answer set semantics is available. In this paper we define a similar translation for causal theories of a more general form, called al-.

be irrelevant for achieving the given goal. We make this idea precise by defining, for an action description in language C+, when a subset of its..