Ideas and Ideals

The article discusses the position expressed by Peter Engelmeyer, the fi rst Russian philosopher of technology, that signs, language and thinking can be subsumed under the concept of technology. The author shows that there is indeed a problem here, to solve the problem it is necessary to understand and distinguish between the concept of technology and non-technology, represented by signs, language and thinking. Based on his studies of the nature and genesis of technology, he characterizes the latter as a cultural and historical formation, a solution to unsolvable problems and tasks, as an artifact that allows solving such problems and creating new natural processes that were previously unobservable and even non-existent, and fi nally, as a conceptualization of technology. Characterizing signs, the author shows that the meaning and the sign as a whole, as a concept, in contrast to the artifact, as a product of activity, relate to the inner, to the life world of a man. For a better understanding of this thesis, a case is considered – a story told by K. Jung in his last book, on the material of which the concept of the life world and the scheme explaining Jung’s act are introduced. Regarding language and thinking, two cases are distinguished: in one they are not technology, in the other, if rules and methodology are used, they can be considered as intellectual technology. The last part of the article discusses hybrid types of technology, specifi cally neural computers. The author shows that in a neurocomputer, due to technical imitation of the neural network and training, a model is created that allows, at the request of a person, to take information from the Internet, construct written speech according to the rules of language and reason according to the rules of logic. At the same time, this model does not replace natural intelligence, which lives and unfolds in people and in social communications. Since people are constantly improving computer technology and trying to replace natural intelligence with artifi cial intelligence, the neurocomputer as a model becomes more and more perfect in terms of the product (the results of linguistic communication and thinking).

In the 20th century, philosophy saw a number of rediscoveries of the idea of culture and, accordingly, the formation of approaches to its study. Given the extremely “confused and ambiguous social history” (T. Eagleton) of this idea, the article reveals its presence in the thoughts of different generations of Russian philosophers. The article is based on the materials of the book “Philosophical Generations” (Moscow, 2022), which contains a collection of autobiographical narratives of Russian philosophers of the mid-20th – early 21st centuries. Based on the memoirs and thoughts of philosophers about their time, the development of the concept of “culture”, its semantic emphases and fl uctuations in the second half of the 20th century are studied. The rich material presented in this “chronicle of the Moscow philosophical community” allows us to trace the specifi cs of philosophical solutions to the “problem of culture” and the reverse impact of structural transformations of culture, art, and aesthetics on philosophy. The search for a relevant philosophical language to describe cultural dynamics in an era of constant and multiple crises deserves special attention. The author of the article suggests looking for ways to place the problem of culture in a philosophical context associated with tradition, modernity and new methodologies in the humanities.

In search of the specifi cs of the domestic approach to the phenomenon of culture, the author turns to the analysis of discussions around the ‘philosophy of culture’, ‘cultural studies’, ‘cultural research’, ‘dialogue of cultures’. Particular attention is paid to the humanitarian discussions of the 1980-1990s, in particular, the discussion around the relevance of the Silver Age, the ‘cult’ of which fell precisely on these years, is reconstructed. The conducted research made it possible to identify, on the one hand, the generational specifi city of the theoretical positions and formulations of the issue of culture presented in the book (fi xing points of misunderstanding and breaks), and on the other, to catch traces of their interactions.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the problem of the relationship between M. Heidegger’s ‘anti-metaphysical’ project and the so-called ‘indictment’, which, with the assistance of a signifi cant part of representatives of modern Western philosophy, seeks to present his philosophy as a metapolitical project of affi rming the priority signifi cance of German ‘soil’, ‘blood’, ‘destiny’, ‘spirit’ for the world history. Appeals to the meaning of M. Heidegger’s philosophy of the event as a refl ection on the historicity of the accomplishment of the truth of Being itself, which has nothing in common with the will to power, which is the apogee of the metaphysical style of thinking, are rejected by these representatives as false and bewitching concepts designed to obscure and hide the ‘true’ intentions of the philosopher. The author of the article presents the thesis that the ‘anti-metaphysical’ project is a marker of the fact that accusations of the national-socialist character of M. Heidegger’s philosophical thinking are groundless and may relate only to his personal views, which had a more or less longterm nature. The development of this thesis is based on the consideration of the criticism of the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger by the French phenomenologists J. -L. Marion and M. Henry. In analyzing the views of the abovementioned authors, the fi rst part of the article presents a historical-philosophical view of M. Heidegger’s ontology of intentionality as an ecstatic sphere of the being of the beings, or ‘Logos’, which acts as a main element in the structure of the fundamental ontology and metaphysics of fi nitude “Being-Logos-Beings”.

The article attempts to determine the specifi cs of the semiotic hierarchy of neo-Protestantism and to identify its structure. The object of the research is the dogmatic and praxeological complexes of neo–Protestantism, and the subject is the structure of their semiotic hierarchy. Semiotic methodology is used as a basic methodology in the study. The terminology used in the hierarchy is defi ned and explained.  The concept of hierophany is studied as the basic one in religious semiosis. The author gives its confessional concepts (Orthodoxy, Catholicism). The historical biblical facts of hierophany are considered. Their semiotic structure is investigated. There is a genetic similarity between the facts of the biblical science of hierophany and the concept of hierophany in neo-Protestantism. The consistency and complementarity of all three semiotic concepts are emphasized. The work also lays the prerequisites for the study of semiotic transformation – semiotic drift. The result of the study was the identifi cation of specifi c features of the semiotics of neo-Protestantism, which allows it to go beyond value judgments from the standpoint of religious semiotics and overcome its theological and social marginalization.

The author shows that humanism as an ideological direction has reached a dead end and has turned into a set of slogans that are far from life. Against the backdrop of these slogans, massive crimes against people are being committed, and the destruction of the surrounding nature continues. Posthumanism began with evidence that man is not the pinnacle of the universe.  These evidences, according to the author, fi rst appeared in the 19th century in the works of A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche. For a long time, posthumanism was developing as a direction in literary criticism, as an analysis of individual features of changes in social consciousness using the example of characters in works of art. At the next stage, posthumanism moved into the sphere of philosophy and the formation of its own special theory of posthumanism. In parallel, the direction of posthumanism began to develop, as close as possible to the practice and achievements of scientifi c and technological progress, called transhumanism. The world of the future in the concept of transhumanism is seen as evolution, the consistent generation of new generations of cyborgs. The article also examines examples of descriptions of the future by the followers of literary and philosophical posthumanism.

Many modern researchers reject Weber’s hypothesis about the connection between the Reformation and the formation of rational capitalism. It is worth agreeing with critics that Weber did not present a complete theory of the origin of capitalism. Nevertheless, the Weber hypothesis provides indications of a necessary (but not suffi cient) condition for the formation of modern capitalism. At the same time, it explains not so much the formation of the capitalist spirit in principle – as something unchangeable and uniform for all countries and centuries – as one, but historically a key episode in the development of capitalism. For the fi rst time, Protestantism successfully fulfi lled the task of forming the spirit of capitalism, since it is a manifestation of anti-traditionalism and individualism. It is also more open to social innovations and contributes to the destruction of community ties. The Reformation created the ideological and psychological prerequisites for the initial accumulation of capital and contributed to the formation of capitalistically motivated classes of entrepreneurs and the proletariat.

The article offers an analysis of the basic principles and history of the development of the philosophy of machinism. In the fi rst paragraph, the socio-cultural and communicative-discursive conditions for the maximum expansion of the scope of the ‘machine’ concept are considered. The fi rst task is related to the differentiation of the worldview position in relation to the specifi cs, development and problems of the relationship between a man and a machine with the philosophical trend of machinism. The semantic spectrum of the word ‘μηχανή’ and the functional of the conceptual metaphor machina mundi, as well as their role in the formation of machinism, are analyzed. The second paragraph is devoted to the principles of formation of modern mechanicism and modern machinism. The author analyzes the specifi cs of machinism, its connection, similarities and differences with the philosophy of mechanicism. It is shown that the conceptual metaphor of machina mundi can represent opposite ontological constructions depending on the image of the machine. It is shown that this image depends not so much on the characteristics of exemplary technical devices as on the expectations of philosophy regarding human activity. The author considers the infl uence of psychoanalytic discourse and schizoanalysis on the formation of a new image of the machine; the contribution of Z. Freud, J. Lacan, F. Guattari and J. Deleuze. It is shown that machinism can be an integral characteristic even of those concepts that oppose each other in their basic ideas. The thesis that machinism is primarily an ontological construct is substantiated. Machinism offers such conditions for the clarity of experience, which, on the one hand, radically break with the Modern philosophy, but, on the other, act as a variant of an ancient ontological construct – the myth of a “sick reality”. In the third paragraph, a brief analysis of the futurological positions of machinism is given. It is shown that as a projection of the future, the role of machinism is associated with various options for human surrender. The positions of L. Bryant, N. Land and others are briefl y analyzed.

In this article, the author considers the issues that the generations “Z” and “Alpha” face in the context of rapidly developing digitalization and the growing role of artifi cial intelligence in human life. This paper considers the ways of comprehension of being, which were once developed and presented by the famous German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The author analyzes the classical comprehension of being taking into account the changes that have occurred due to the widespread digitalization of society. The author considers the impact of digitalization on the state of development of modern society, namely, on the fundamental issues of ethics: free will, the meaning of life and the purpose of man. New technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for people, such as universal access to information, entertainment services, but the author emphasizes that these opportunities have a downside, which is expressed fi rst of all in the limitation of personal autonomy, and secondly by the negative impact on the cognitive functions of a person.

In conclusion of the article the author comes to the opinion that at the present moment of time there are two categories by means of which in the modern world one can be included in the real world while trying to preserve freedom and striving for independence from the system, namely, creativity and cognition.

From F. Nietzsche to modern post- and meta-modernism, there is a continuous criticism of science, cognition, and rationally oriented intellectual culture. By the beginning of the XXI century, a paradoxical situation emerged, when, on the one hand, science claims to increase the effi ciency of activity in any fi eld that scientists start to engage in. However, on the other hand, what is happening with the growth of effi ciency of scientifi c activity itself? Is it possible to consider scientifi cally organized research, which scientists are engaged in, and the way they do it? In the development of athletics and personality, the athlete learns to use the whole organism, and the scientist – a part of the psyche. It is appropriate to assert that the factors of lifestyle, mode of life, training of mind in intellectual games, etc. are the condition of meaningful support of mental activity. Having established the ideal of science, cognition of “objective reality” as existence independent of man and his consciousness, it turned out that the quality of knowledge should be paid for by protection from the scientist’s infl uence on natural and social objects. As a result, there is an increasing distancing of man from the Universe and from himself. If the situation is not radically changed, society has no strategic future. If intellectuals recognize the fact of the gaining strength of the “cognitive turn” it allows us to turn to actions to “change the foundations of intellectual culture”. A transition from mono-centric to poly-centric attitudes is required, as an end to disputes about the preference of a certain primordial being, to the understanding that reality is a product of the combination of physical, mental, and cognitive. It is necessary to rehabilitate the presence of the subjective factor in cognition. Cognition does not only refl ect, but complements reality. In intellectual activity one should fi nd a balance between its objective and subjective aspects. To make a functional distinction between concepts – carrying content and meaning, and categories – responsible for the routing of reasoning. To substantiate the expediency of separating Small and Large logical forms with their purpose to be used in the design of research. Widely using in preparation and realization of scientifi c researches the apparatuses of categorical-system methodology (CSM) and the theory of dynamic information systems (TDIS), to connect the works in the listed directions with the development of new technologies of natural intelligence. An original example of research design is given.

Happiness is a universal category describing all processes of human existence. Receiving education, acquiring knowledge is an important process of personal and civil formation. The research problem is solving by the authors is connected with the search of the role and possibility of gaining happiness in the process of education from the theoretical positions of philosophy, axiology, and sociology of culture. A review of felicitous theories and methods accentuates the inattention and methodological helplessness of the humanities in researching human happiness and its natural right. The authors believe that the statement and justifi cation of the category of “feeling”, its introduction into the scientific turnover of socio-humanitarian disciplines is in demand in modern scientifi c practice. Modern pedagogical practice, limited to standards, instructions is quite far from the process of acquiring knowledge and self-disclosure of the student and teacher personalities in this process. It not only does not involve the release of feelings, but also poses a threat to the social order of society, violating the social position of the status of the interaction between teacher and student, “freezing” the meaning of the process of social inheritance requirements performance, transferring the educational process from the sphere of culture to the sphere of market relations. The value of knowledge is included in the value system of society and does not need to be evaluated. To realize the value potential of knowledge means to create conditions for the happy interaction of the main participants in this process – the carriers of the statuses “teacher” and “student”, but not to control the amount of this process and the cognitive energy allocated in this process. Knowledge may have terminal and instrumental meanings, but its main purpose is to serve the formation of personality, not to serve the controllers’ meanings of existence. Knowledge belongs to everyone; it is produced and open to all. The terminal knowledge is in the depths of a human personality, connecting him to the higher structures of experience. Learning aims towards awakening of such knowledge within a person. The meaning of the evaluation of this process is in the fact of the fulfi llment of such awakening or the lack of desire for awakening. Knowledge is a cultural value that transcends the experience of a single individual or an entire community. Education is woven into the structures of social institutions by its knowledge (not just competence) component. The need for knowledge is one of the basic, vital needs of people.

The subject of the article is a biogenic approach to cognition, considered from the perspective of the methodology of philosophical analysis. The essential basis of this approach is the study of cognition as a natural process that has an evolutionary history. The objectives of the biogenic approach are to identify the origins of cognition, to reveal its general manifestations at all levels of cognitive complexity. As a philosophical basis for this approach, one should single out a broad approach to cognition, when it is considered as a property of living things, and it is argued that the simplest biological beings functioning on a non-neural basis already have cognition. The biogenic approach proceeds from the fact that cognition is considered as a process aimed at achieving a favorable state of a biological agent for solving existential tasks (conservation and reproduction), taking into account a certain prototype of such a state based on the control of physico-chemical processes carried out inside the body and taking into account the infl uence of external factors and past experience. The article concludes that the biogenic approach has many strengths, as it allows us to determine the primary level of biological complexity of the cognition process, aims to fi nd criteria for identifying biological beings with cognition, and provides an opportunity to initiate a discussion on the construction of a unifi ed theory of cognition that takes into account and unites all manifestations of cognition at different levels of cognitive complexity. However, the biogenic approach cannot avoid a number of problems (terminological ambiguity regarding the defi nition of cognition, the lack of clear criteria for cognizing and non-cognizing biological beings, as well as the mechanisms of cognitive complexity, etc.).

In this regard, the article proposes to formulate a broad and narrow interpretation of the concept of ‘cognition’, move away from a purely quantitative approach to understanding different levels of cognitive complexity, and investigate the causes and mechanisms of such complexity, taking into account the qualitative specifi cs of the levels of biological organization of living beings.

The research is presented in methodological, scientifi c, institutional, ethical aspects.

The author has developed a dynamic process methodology (DPM), which includes: the APМ approach (selection of scientifi c results in a given fi eld), the SPМ approach (selection of scientifi c personnel), the Flow Method (improves the quality of forecasts, reducing uncertainty and risks), technology for selecting the most signifi cant achievements in a given fi eld of science. The article reveals the possibilities of DPM in relation to science and education as branches of the national economy. The DPM is actually a tool for selecting high-quality scientifi c developments and their authors in order to protect them and possibly introduce them into the country’s practice.

From the point of view of economic security (ES) as a science, the uniqueness of national economic security (NES) as an object of research is shown, since it is not the ES of signifi cant economic entities (households, organizations, million-plus cities, regions, industries, the state), but a completely new independent fi eld of research. In this paper, the author will present one of the subjects of NES as a multidisciplinary object – how plagiarism negatively affects the effi ciency of using budget funds.

From the institutional point of view, it proves the need to create a special body that ensures the safety of the national economy, since in the context of a hybrid war, the issues of speed and quality of decisions are particularly acute, which are practically impossible to implement in the current situation due to the distribution of responsibility between different regulatory bodies of the economic bloc.

Ethically, the issues of plagiarism and responsibility for it are currently a painful topic for a scientist of any specialty. The author suggests defi ning plagiarism on two levels: verbatim borrowings and borrowing ideas. DPM in science and education is able to create a healthy scientifi c environment as a prevention of plagiarism at all levels and unjustifi ed spending of budget funds. It is proposed to create a “board of honor” for Russian scientists in the form of an encyclopedia in all scientifi c fi elds with a brief description of their scientifi c contributions.

Today’s energy transition is a paradigmatic change from fossil fuel-based systems to those centered on renewable energy sources. This transformation spans technological, economic, social, and ethical dimensions and is deeply rooted in the philosophical principles of sustainable development.  Ethical considerations are gaining prominence, particularly through the emerging frameworks of energy ethics and energy justice. These approaches emphasize the moral responsibilities of governments, corporations, and individuals toward both the environment and future generations. Historically, concepts such as ecological modernization and intergenerational justice have shaped the discourse, reinforcing the need for equitable and responsible energy governance. However, despite these guiding ideals, many dominant actors such as international oil companies within the global energy sector do not consistently prioritize the principles of the common good. In practice, the energy transition is often hindered by entrenched interests, stakeholder confl icts, and the prioritization of short-term corporate gains over longterm societal benefi ts. This paper analyzes the fundamental theoretical foundations underlying the energy transition and the integration of renewable energy sources into existing energy systems, with particular attention to the role of international oil and gas companies. It argues that ensuring a just and effective transition requires a rethinking of corporate strategies through the lens of justice, sustainable development, and ethical responsibility toward future generations. Based on theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates that a successful energy transformation entails not merely a technological shift, but institutional change, reassessment of values, and a long-term commitment to sustainability. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of reconciling economic and environmental priorities through innovation, stakeholder engagement, and ethical governance. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for scholars and practitioners seeking to navigate the complexities of energy transition in the 21st century. demonstrates that a successful energy transformation entails not merely a technological shift, but institutional change, reassessment of values, and a long-term commitment to sustainability. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of reconciling economic and environmental priorities through innovation, stakeholder engagement, and ethical governance. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for scholars and practitioners seeking to navigate the complexities of energy transition in the 21st century.