Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The paper is taking up the original research, spanning now a quarter-century, on distinguishing European cultural-historical epochs using the philosophical toolset proper. It is about an application of the phenomenological dialectic methodology within the general Platonic approach to the problem of knowledge and understanding where the former per se turns into the self-correlation of sense, while the latter appears as an embodiment of knowledge over ‘the other’, distinguished from pure knowledge ‘by a measure of reason’ of its holder. Thus any (...) thing considered in correlation with itself as a subject matter of knowledge, appears as its own idea. Correlation of an idea with its reasonable embodiment transfers a thing into the ‘medial’ domain of understanding. It is here that the particular historical comprehension of types for the above ideality, embodiment, and being a holder allows for considering epochs through the lens of ‘epochal’ ontologies. In such acts of understanding, philosophy is responsible for the love of wisdom as a synthesis of knowledge and life in its reasonable explanations, and history – for the comprehension of being in its continuous making, and culture – for the picturesquely personal expression of human history. Thus emerges a kaleidoscope of picturesquely expressed ontologies where various epochs in European history are explicitly distin- guished upon sense-bearing grounds. This philosophical ‘depicting’ shall be preceded by a definition of concept for world pictures as a European thought heritage proper. For this purpose, on the backdrop of such categories as essence, sense, reason, intelligence, eidos, idea, symbol, myth, and name, the author is preliminarily identifying here: Europe – as the idea of arranging vital space under the guidance of personality; history – as a self-realizing being in the making; personality – as an actually embodied self-consciousness; culture – as an expressed mythology of human personality. Hence, the final definition of the world picture as history is typologically expressed in culture. Article received 17.08.2019. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 87-96.

The paper is devoted to Nikolay Lossky who was one of the leading Russian philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. We demonstrate the interrelationship between three aspects of Lossky’s philosophy: realism in the theory of knowledge, hierarchical personalism, and supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. We pay attention to the contemporary relevance of Lossky, and we discuss and critique his ideas in light of those of other philosophers. Lossky acknowledges that the subject interacts with being itself and that knowledge (...) is not a shadow or copy of being. His ontology is based on intuitivism and epistemological optimism. Its main categories are God, as the super-systematic principle, and monads. In Lossky’s metaphysics, the idea of abstract ideal principles of being is quite harmoniously combined with personalism. Lossky’s ontology has strong ethical underpinnings. He considers that values are rooted in being and that the evolution of the world is directed by God towards the good. Lossky elaborates a supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. He extrapolates principles of teleological determination, which are fundamental to human existence, on the underlying levels of the world as a whole. Many trends of modern thought are in tune with Lossky’s philosophy, including a return to metaphysics, panpsychism, Platonism, and the desire to unite the religious worldview with new scientific discoveries. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the S. Gogotskomu, outstanding Ukrainian philosopher. Proceedings Gogotskogo played a crucial role in spreading the philosophy of I. Kant in Ukraine.

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

This text is an English translation of those several sections of the original paper in Russian, where collection-related issues are considered. The full citation of the original paper is as following: Pavlinov I.Ya. 2016. [Bioraznoobrazie i biokollektsii: problema sootvetstvia]. In: Pavlinov I.Ya. (comp.). Aspects of Biodiversity. Archives of Zoological Museum of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Vol. 54, Pр. 733–786. -/- Orientation of biology, as a natural science, on the study and explanation of the similarities and differences between organisms led in (...) the second half of the 20th century to the recognition of a specifi c subject area of biological explorations, viz. biodiversity (BD). One of the important general scientifi c prerequisites for this shift was understanding that (at the level of ontology) the structured diversity of the living nature is its fundamental property equivocal to subjecting of some of its manifestations to certain laws. At the level of epistemology, this led to acknowledging that the “diversifi cationary” approach to description of the living beings is as justifi able as the before dominated “unifi cationary” one. This general trend has led to a signifi cant increase in the attention to BD. From a pragmatic perspective, its leitmotif was conservation of BD as a renewable resource, while from a scientifi c perspective the leitmotif was studying it was studying BD as a specifi c natural phenomenon. These two points of view are united by recognition of the need for scientific substantiation of BD conservation strategy, which implies the need for a detailed study of BD itself. At the level of ontology, one of the key problems in the study of BD (leaving aside the question of its genesis) is determination of its structure, which is interpreted as a manifestation of the structure of the Earth’s biota itself. With this, it is acknowledged that the subject area of empirical explorations is not the BD as a whole ( “Umgebung”) but its particular manifestations (“Umwelts”). It is proposed herewith to recognized, within the latter: fragments of BD (especially taxa and ecosystems), hierarchical levels of BD (primarily within- and interorganismal ones), and aspects of BD (before all taxonomic and meronomic ones). Attention is drawn to a new interpretation of bioinformatics as a discipline that studies the information support of BD explorations. An important fraction of this support are biocollections. The scientifi c value of collections means that they make it possible both empirical inferring and testing (verification) of the knowledge about BD. This makes biocollections, in their epistemological status, equivalent to experiments, and so makes studies of BD quite scientific. It is emphasized that the natural objects (naturalia), which are permanently kept in collections, contain primary (objective) information about BD, while information retrieved somehow from them is a secondary (subjective) one. Collection, as an information resource, serves as a research sample in the studies of BD. Collection pool, as the totality of all collection materials kept in repositories according to certain standards, can be treated as a general sample, and every single collection as a local sample. The main characteristic of collection-as-sample is its representativeness; so the basic strategy of development of the collection pool is to maximize its representativeness as a means to ensure correspondence of structure of biocollection pool to that of BD itself. The most fundamental characteristic of collection, as an information resource, is its scientific signifi cance. The following three main groups of more particular characteristics are distinguished: — the “proper” characteristics of every collection are its meaningfulness, informativeness, reliability, adequacy, documenting, systematicity, volume, structure, uniqueness, stability, lability; — the “external” characteristics of collection are resolution, usability, ethic constituent; — the “service” characteristics of collection are its museofication, storage system security, inclusion in metastructure, cost. In the contemporary world, development of the biocollection pool, as a specific resource for BD research, requires considerable organizational efforts, including work on their “information support” aimed at demonstrating the necessity of existence of the biocollections. (shrink)

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a wave of the so-called “turns” — “linguistic turn”, “narrative turn”, “biographical turn” and “visual turn”, which have led to an obvious shift in research interests and methodological choices in humanities and social sciences. The researchers from various disciplinary fields have admitted that, to understand the logic of different forms of knowledge, we have to examine their “textual” nature; that any research in the social, political, psychological or cultural sphere turns (...) out to be focused on linguistic issues; that social reality is inherently textual and that all social practices are constituted and structured by discourses and intense struggles of different discourses. Sociology did not stand to the side of such methodological changes: at least for two and a half decades the concepts “narrative” and “narrative analysis”, “discourse” and “discourse analysis”, “text”, “context”, “intertext”, etc. have been extremely popular at the theoretical and empirical levels Nonetheless, we still have not received their precise definitions and they are interpreted quite arbitrarily, being based on the conceptual and methodological preferences of the researcher, as well as the goals and objectives of the particular applied or fundamental research project. The article identifies the key themes of the ongoing and, unfortunately, missing methodological discussions in the field of textual analysis that would be quite useful to clarify at least the criteria for the correct naming of different formats of analytical work with textual data. (shrink)

It would not be an exaggeration to assume that the Begriffsgeschichte studies are now spreading through practically all fields of the Humanities. Its initial proposal was to explore the sociopolitical lexicon as a tool for creating history. It paid attention to the idea of untranslatable concepts in particular languages, despite the fact that they often have the same Latin or Greek roots. But the cases where one word is supposed to convey the meaning of the Latin root by using a (...) root original to this given language are still relatively unexplored. Such is the case of the Russian language where the concept of “society” was expressed initially by the word “obshchestvo,” derived from the Slavic root “obshch-,” meaning “common.” From the linguistic point of view, we suggest that the traditional question “When did the word ‘obshchestvo’ obtain its sociopolitical meaning?” should be replaced by the following: “What meaning of this Russian word has become a political one?” To answer this question, we should explore the proper linguistic conditions of this transition. This means finding out how it is possible to linguistically/politically arrive from the constructions like “the community of the wellness” to the patterns of “the thoughts of the society,” “the soul of the society,” or “the suffering society.”. (shrink)

Тhis article considered the ontological aspects of philosophy by XX century’s western scientism and religious metaphysics. Specially attention concentrated of the empirical and metaphysical components of the seontological paradigms, and also of the problem of ontological relativity and relations with the anthropological investigations.

The research is dedicated to literary reception of Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. His life and his work still produce the keen interest both coming from the community of professionals and from the most unbiased audience. After the publication of the “Black Notebooks”, Heidegger’s cooperation with the Nazi authorities in 1933 no longer seems an unfortunate episode, which can be attributed to political short-sightedness. The dependence of Heidegger’s views on collective and social prejudices falls (...) into the space of literature long before becoming the subject of a philosophical judgement. In a variety of literary works, the philosopher persona has been developed in quite a surprising way. On the one hand, the familiar concept of fundamental ontology gets looked at, critically and uniquely, through a lens of fiction. On the other hand, Heidegger’s biography itself perfectly fits into literary self-reflexivity, which was never designed to differentiate one’s actions from one’s theories. Represented by this paper, the first part of the work has several objectives: 1) to justify the legality of writers and poets to make judgments about complex philosophical constructions – on the material of the texts, where there are reminiscences of famous Heidegger themes ; 2) to reproduce a biographical component of Heidegger’s philosophy through the prism of various literary experiences, chronologically covering the period of his life from birth to regular professor at the University of Freiburg; 3) to demonstrate the epistemological resource of fiction: it combines mental, verbal, temporal, as well as intersubjective and political dimensions in its narrative, and thus gives not only a multifaceted portrait of the thinker in the cultural and historical decorations of his time, but also an idea of changes in the general spiritual climate caused by social transformation in the postwar world. (shrink)

The main object of this interdisciplinary paper is examining fan fiction as a social practice and a literary experience. Its conclusions draw upon the results from two years of field research conducted in the Russian Harry Potter female fan fiction Internet community. Reading communities play a crucial part in this new type of literary communication, even though these communities are completely ignored by the literature industry. These online communities strongly support the readers’ writings, provide an exchange of experiences, encourage the (...) rethinking of different contexts of literary and social behavior, foster the development of literary and social imagination, and so on. While analyzing and theorizing fan fiction in detail as a literary experience, the author draws upon Uses of Literature by Rita Felski and her concept of the “modes of textual engagement”. The author comes to the conclusion that fan fiction uses even more “modes of textual engagement” compared to institutionalized literature, while minimizing all the factors leading to the rejection of a reader — which helps to understand the reasons for fan fiction’s enormous popularity and the practices of extensive reading. Apart from the four general functions of literature Rita Felski deals with, fan fiction is based on two additional functions of the correspondence with “canon”, and the correspondence on pornography. All these modes of textual engagement saturate the fan fiction reader’s experience with intensity, corporeality and efficiency. This ethnographic research is complemented with theoretical questions about the changing role of a reader and a writer in amateur online literary communication. (shrink)

An attempt is being made to consider laughter as a sociocultural phenomenon and to determine the place of laughter in culture. Culture is viewed from a semiotic point of view as a sign system. The culture is always repressive. Repressiveness of culture is determined by the repressiveness of the sign. A sign requires recognition, the ability to read, interpret it. The definition establishes rules and conventions. In a signified space, we constantly feel limitations, pressure, and lack of freedom. Laughter is (...) existing «on the edge» of culture. At the same time, laughter is socially, historically and culturally determined. It is problematic to attribute laughter to pre-symbolic communication means, tribal memory, which links a person’s behavior with that of his ancestors. In the process of social evolution, laughter takes on a sign. Laughter refers to the symbolic and symbolic sphere of human activity and is a purely human property. «Homo ridens» provides for «Animal symbolicum». From a semiotic point of view, laughter is seen as a phenomenon that arises as a result of a violation of the established order of signification, the loss by a sign of its significance, or its acquisition of a new, unexpected value and meaning. The concept of M. M. Bakhtin’s carnival is considered as a theory of the reciprocity of sign and non-sign, chaos and orderliness. The carnival reveals the conventions of the sign, the conventions of culture as a whole. Laughter exposes culture as a sign system, as a system of conventions. Laughter can be seen as a kind of reaction to the repression of culture, as a moment of liberation from the repression of culture. But a person living in society cannot go beyond culture. While criticizing culture, laughter strengthens culture. Laughter can also be repressive, especially in relation to who they laugh at. Laughter emerges as a universal socio-cultural phenomenon, through the lens of which one can trace the dialectic of the natural, social, cultural, as well as individual, collective and social in human life. (shrink)