Ideas and Ideals

The paper presents the evolution of pragmatism, with an emphasis on its third stage which is called neo-pragmatism. The paper considers the specific features of this stage in the light of the philosophy of Joseph Margolis. The paper demonstrates that Margolis takes part in all relevant discussions of this philosophical movement, first of all, about the relationship of realism and relativism and about the nature of the truth. The question about the nature of the truth related to the problem of incommensurability and alethic relativism, and Margolis offers his own version of this kind of relativism – the robust relativism. The article discusses these issues in general. A more detailed analysis the authors provide for the Margolis’s solution of the problem of the realism and relativism compatibility. On the one hand, Margolis firmly stays on relativistic positions. On the other hand, he argues that it is possible to defend realism against relativistic attacks but only if to reconcile these two trends. Margolis offers two strategies for doing this. He implements the first strategy through the clarification of the nature of skepticism. He formulates the form of realism which could resist to skepticism, it ought to satisfy the main statements of neopragmatism. Such a kind of realism Margolis calls minimal realism. The second strategy appeals to practices and activities and it is implemented through the actual survival and viability of the human species that is closely related to the historicity of human existence. For the last strategy Margolis offers two ways as well, the pragmatic and epistemic ones. The epistemic way allows to legitimize realism through an appeal to the technology, the existence and the use of which indicates human cognitive competence about external world. The pragmatic way legitimizes realism through the successful interventions of collective human knowledge in different structures of the world. Summarizing the authors draw a conclusion, that Margolis tries to occupy a middle position between two poles – absolutism (foundationalism) and relativism, which are presented most clearly in the pragmatists dispute between Putnam and Rorty, and thereby he tries to eliminate the differences between these two tendencies in contemporary philosophy.

The article provides the analysis of modern approaches to the theory of value in economic anthropology with an insight to David Graber’s works. The article highlights the impact of Sociology and Economics on the genesis of anthropological theory of value. The main task of the article is to identify the key points of the modern anthropological value studies and to analyze them in terms of Economics. The provided analysis shows that anthropological theory of value has a lot in common with marginalism, however, it also highlights the significant differences between these approaches. The last part of the article focuses on the opportunities to apply the economic anthropology conclusions to Economics and special attention is paid to the critical analysis of the socio-anthropological definition of value in case of the luxury consumption and the problem of falsification of the hypothesis of the symbolic capital.

The article suggests a critical overview of the most prominent discussion among the European and American researchers about the dogma problem in Sextus Empiricus teaching: whether the Pyrrhonian sceptic can have a dogma. Due to his philosophy’s features labelled by Sextus as a non-dogmatic one, scholars have divided into two groups. On the one hand there are supporters of an «urban» interpretation (M. Frede, G. Fine, C. Perin) who argue that the sceptic can have some beliefs – namely impressions passively acquired by the sceptic during his life. On the other hand there are the supporters of a «rustic» interpretation (J. Burnyeat, J. Barnes) who refute the former view and take the opposite one: sceptics can have no belief, for belief is defined as a proposition about the world taken to be true by an agent who expresses it. In that case the sceptic’s ataraxia, based on suspension of judgement, wouldn’t come to life. After the analysis of arguments a critical rethinking of the grounds of the discussion is presented. G. Striker argued that the results of a discussion would depend on belief’s notion. K. Vogt suggested to apply the ancient notion of belief as an assent to an impression and came to the conclusion, that the sceptic cannot have beliefs. His beliefs would be pathos, which just push him to act. In addition an idea of K. Vogt is presented that one should distinguish doxa and dogma, for the latter notion was thought as a body of teaching, not as a singular statement. The conclusion contains the main results of the discussion to this moment.

  The article is devoted to the role of self-organization as an independent fact of the ethno-social stabilization in Siberia in the XVII-th century. As a methodological basis of research the authors propose a synthesis of structural and phenomenological paradigms, which allows using such concepts as social order, management and self-organization of local Siberian ethnic communities to describe their interethnic nature. In the authors’ opinion each local community forms up in the interaction between the institutes of social organization and self-organization. Due to the fact that the central government was at a distance and Siberian population was small, the social distance between the central government and local authorities, and, in general, between the government and the local community was not that important. Many problems had to be solved on the spot and the center only legitimized the decisions and orders. The local community solved the problems in the provinces and the central authority just legitimated the decisions and orders which had been made at the local level. The situation encouraged the actors (the participants of the processes) to play their roles freely depending not only on their formal duties but also using their personal and group interests, taking into consideration practical needs and welfare of the local communities. The authors suggest a hypothesis of the importance of horizontal relations, personal status in the formation of a new social order, which was not less important than the vertical power structure.

The article investigates the characteristics of socio-cultural manifestations of theoretical knowledge about socialization. The author identifies these manifestations with the theoretical images, which have three attributes. First, theoretical images are the results of (re-)construction of theoretical discourse which appropriately represents the main traits of reality. Second, the mentioned images correspond with the types of scientific and philosophic rationality, i. e. classical, non-classical, post-nonclassical rationality. Third, theoretical images rely on different versions of normative, interpretative or normative-interpretative methodological perspectives. The author argues that the listed attributes should be given a high priority while studying knowledge about socialization as phenomena of socio-cultural reality.

In the article the author suggests a new approach to the problem of anomie, which manifests itself in the form of deviant behavior. In his opinion inconsistence is a prerequisite for social anomie. The main social viability criterion of an individual is the official recognition of the value and necessity of his/her activities and functions which the person performs within social institutions. The main criterion of the social inability of an individual is non-recognition of activities and functions resulting from the imbalance between the consumed and produced products of his/her activities (labor) with the disbalance in favor of the consumed. It does not matter whether the individual produces more goods required from him/her or less. The very presence of the disbalance in the amount of the products of labor generates anomie. As the result of this imbalance the individual is first gradually alienated from the labor process by the society and then from people as the subjects of social life because of that disproportion in the produced and consumed goods, which doesn’t meet socially accepted norms. The alienation of the individual causes inadequate forms of adaptive reactions in the form of deviant behavior, with the aim of social adaptation, which guarantees safety. The author singles out an individual as the subject of anomie, who is a source of deviant behavior and social institutions in which the individual is not able to socialize. Planning his further work the author outlines the plan of his investigations: to define the socio-historical stages of social institutions development, as well as to determine the involvement of individuals in the activities of those institutions.

Within the concept of post-industrial society the accumulation of human capital is considered to be a major factor of accelerated economic development. Since the advent of the theory of "human capital" has been more than half a century. On the subject of many papers published. However, researchers still do not have a single point of view on the economic content of the concept of "human capital". Appeal to the essence of the category of "capital" leads to the conclusion about the illegality of the use of the term in the strict scientific terminology "human capital". The article reviews the definitions, that researchers offer to disclose the content of the concept. Analysis of the content presented definitions leads to the conclusion that in this case, refers to the human potential and the degree of its development. Within the framework of the theory of "human capital" great attention is paid to the measurement of its cost. However, the value of human potential is difficult to keep exclusively to the valuation, since the possibilities of direct measuring method does not exist in principle. In connection with this conclusion about the need for further research to develop methods to a greater extent based on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis of human potential.

The article considers the problem of social adaptation of personality. The author investigates social thinking from the resource approach perspective as an individual social capital of a person. The introduction presents different opinions on the theme of investigations, highlights the main problems concerning human capital in modern science and defines the methodological foundation of the research. The main part of the article is devoted to the consideration of the adaptive function of social thinking as a vital ability of a person to improve the quality of his /her life. The author presents an overview of different interpretations of the issue given by outstanding scholars S.L. Rubinsteyn, K. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, E. Fromm. They view social thinking as a functional mechanism of consciousness. Thinking can be adaptive or ineffective. This is due to the individual interpretation of certain situations. These authors have noted a greater role of consciousness and social thinking in the identification and resolution of conflicts of personality and society. The rest of the article analyses the adaptive model of social thinking, which the author calls "socio-productive thinking," the main human resource, social capital of a person. The position of the author is based on humanistic values. The author’s contribution into the development of the problem consists in investigation of the less developed aspects of the problem of human capital and interpretation of the adaptive model of social thinking as a resource of a person.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called "people of culture" in two areas of Eurasia - Europe and East Asia. They appear as a product of cultural exchange between the "South" (the Mediterranean, China proper) and the "North", inhabited by people of a different mentality and economy. We are talking about a different perception of the so-called ancient culture, that is, the configuration of culture that developed in antiquity and became paradigmatic for the whole metaregion ("Christian World", East Asian Civilization Zone). As examples of such people are taken the largest figures of medieval culture I. S. Eriugena, who left a deep trace in scholasticism, and a member of the imperial clan Yēlǜ in the nomadic Chitan Empire Liao (907-1125) Tuǜ. People with unconventional looks on culture and complex destiny, they demonstrated a peculiar attitude to southern culture not as a form and means of education, but as a complex of ideas and recipes for building a new political and cultural reality.

The philosophy of N. Berdyaev is a restless movement of thought in the space with three conceptual coordinates. The person, creativity, freedom in their unity constitute the universe of Spirit, define the dynamics, the existential orientation of genuine philosophical thinking. The philosophical thought creatively confirms the being of a free person by means of the ideal man’s image formation: the ideal man is opposed to the evil kingdom of necessity, oversteps the limits and overcomes the empirical world. According to Berdyaev, the ethical quintessence of the European culture is three images of the ideal man – the sage, the saint and the knight. This article traces the sources of the knight ideal’s interpretation in the texts of the Russian thinker. The romantic idea of knighthood as “an eternal task of human spirit” demanded overcoming of early Slavophiles’ conceptualizations of knighthood, but Berdyaev valued these authors very highly for their aspiration to holistic understanding of Spirit’s life, to the harmony between the internal and the external. In his publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev outlines two lines of knighthood’s idealization as an embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. The first line is connected with the discussion about “new religious consciousness”, D.S. Merezhkovsky's idea about metaphysical primordiality and a religious equivalence of "spirit" and "flesh". The second line is determined by Berdyaev’s treatment of K.N. Leontyev's heritage where the historical knighthood represents itself as an alternative of the bourgeois commonness and mediocrity, vulgarity and philistinism.

The current article says that transference and entrenchment of information in the space and time is possible due to the appearance of a written language. A text is characterized by the function of memory, because it is not only a generator of new meanings, but it is also a guide of cultural memory. A written language can store and accumulate reminiscences about preceding contexts. Speaking about reminiscences of a text we should note that a text becomes meaningful. Such meaningful text enters into relations with cultural tradition (or cultural remembrance), which is born in mind of addressees. Texts which store cultural activity include the ability to condense the information, formulated differently; the ability of storing historical and cultural remembrances appear in such texts. Hence texts, which are transferred from one generation to another through centuries, don’t lose the information.  This paper is devoted to the principles of replication of cultural information. In culture this task is performed by units of cultural information – memes. Mutations of memes are presented as transformation formulae. The current article deals with aspects of preserving non-genetic data. The subject of analysis is formulae and clichés of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Bible. The development of linguistic formulae is under scrutiny. The main types of transformation of formulae and clichés are defined. Different variants of formulae are given; they are registered on the basis of the Bible. The author describes four main types of transformations of formulae phrases, which demonstrate development of relations in the culture. These four main types are: type “A” which is reframing of conventional formulae; type “Б” which is lexical substitution of a key-term; type “B” which is production of new combinations and forms with new semantic structure, type “Г” is a description with substitution of a lexeme in the context of a formula, which denotes different events. The author demonstrates that formulae deal with innovative descriptions which are characterized with more detalization. Consequently, growth of information is described.

Taxonomy of the world traced back to classic commentator’s tradition of Porphyry. The works by Porphyry gives us foundation to judge the tempo of development of semiotics and philosophy of the name. Compiling the taxonomy of the natural world Porphyry drew subtle definition of objective and nonobjective substances in the live languages by means of their formal exposure. The characteristics of individual exposure of the world coincides with the consequence of layers in the map of the world since ancient periods until nowadays. Thus the sequence of floral, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic codes in interpretation of the world coincides with the natural taxonomy of the tree by Porphyry. The presentation of individual meanings is connected with the transition from poor sections of the taxonomy to the developed ones. So the individual properties of space are at maximum low, and many spatial substances acquire metaphorical meaning in floral, zoomoorphic and anthropomorphic codes. The degree of individual properties is increasing due to their denoting by proper names, which transfer the higher degree of discretion. The individual properties present themselves a sort of fossils, within which we detect the change of the mapping of the world. Therefore the most ancient Indo-European mapping of the world is connected with the concept of the world tree. So the researcher gets a possibility to register such fossils in the form of the individual texts which depict the image of the space in the evolutionary program of space. As a substitution of floral code zoomorphic code comes, when individual properties of space are described on the basis of the form of the animal. The body of the animal in individual properties is richer than the plant. Then the anthropomorphic code comes. The mapping of the world is a very important task in metaphors microcosm- and macrocosm. The metaphors lexically are independent from each other, which gives the evidence of low plausibility of mixture in the order of space. The deeper we penetrate into the ancient layers of language, the more specialized meanings we discover.

This is the first attempt ever made when the author investigates the culture of bell-ringing in orthodox Greece. The purpose of the work is to define the features of this tradition. The article considers the following issues: the types of the Greek bell architectural constructions, their bell arsenal, national specifics of bell-ringing, and the characteristics of the orthodox bell ringing. The Greek tradition was developing under the strong influence of the Byzantine empire with its periods of blossom and decline and then Greece was invaded by crusaders (and later by the Turks) and those invasions resulted in the great influence of the Catholic church. These events defined its national peculiarity. Turning to the post-Byzantine region broadens the geography of research to the new to the Russian campanology direction. The facts which had been earlier unknown were collected by the author of the article in his expeditions to Greece. The publication of these facts is a contribution into the research database. In the long run it will help to trace the signs of influence of the Byzantium culture on the art of the Russian bell-ringing.

How to express inexpressibly complicated things in a simple way? In order to find the answer to this question, Art always comes up with the only solution, which means modifying its own expressional vocabulary, to alter and renew the language. As a rule, the reaction of the perceptive audience, rigidly philistine in the most cases, was stigma of the new art principles, its apologists and creators. In the 19th century, there was an opposing reciprocal reaction on the part of the artists, which manifested in the image of the unappreciated genius and his proclamation of the Art of future whereas sublimation of the genius phenomenon transformed from the concrete personality into abstract principles. They are often expressed in the characters’ names, and even through the names of mythological Gods which seemed to be so symbolic and collective that the process of their complete transformation is hidden behind each of them. This process has already become common practice in art, for instance, as it was in Franz Liszt’s demonic imagery.

This article is devoted to the problem statement for the interdisciplinary research of “the will" concept. As the main methodological principle of research, the author uses the archaeological method of Michel Foucault, whose method was used by Giorgio Agamben in the study of “the will" concept. The main part of the article gives an integrated cultural-historical psychological analysis of “the will" concept in Russian philosophy and psychology. The author comes to the conclusion that “the will" concept exists only in the Russian-language philosophy or in translations of European philosophical studies into the Russian language. Thereby this fact indicates that the translations created the concept confusion: “the wish” was interpreted as “the will”. Basing on the works of modern psychologists (E.P. Ilyin, V.A. Ivannikov), the author comes to the conclusion that the philosophical understanding of the will in the XX century was forgotten, and the psychological understanding is deficient. The author pays special attention to the theory of the will suggested by the Russian psychologist K.D. Kavelin, whose work was not noticed during his lifetime and it is forgotten by modern psychology. In conclusion, the author proposes to direct the philosophical efforts to create the foundations for defining “the will" concept, giving the opportunity for applied psychological work with this concept.

In the article the words “mir”, “volya”, “svet”, “pravda”. On the material of the Ancient Russian literature it is shown that each of these words has at least two substantially distinct meanings, and two (or three) meanings influence each other, creating game of senses inexpressible in other languages. At the same time, these words define the semantic core of national self-identification in modern times, forming the certain attitude to the key principles of life. In XIX-th century in Russian poetry “volya” is opposed to the Western “svoboda” (liberty) as the Christian goal to specific political position. The ambivalence of the national consciousness is presented by the fact that the ideal peaceful beauty of the mundane cooperative communal life coexisted with a free desire to get beyond the world-community and earthly world. Yet both ideals were receiving internal justification, intersecting with Pravda-truth as well as with pravda-justice.

The round table discussed how philosophy interprets the concept of will and whether it is possible, basing on this understanding, to create a methodology for a psychological understanding of the will. It is stated that so far in the domestic tradition there is no methodology that would overcome the crisis associated with the inability to develop this concept. The category of will is considered in the key of the historical and philosophical traditions; it plays an important role both in ancient and medieval philosophy, and in the philosophy of modern times. Special attention was paid to the Schopenhauer approach, who believed that everything is an objectification of the will. The will was also discussed in its relation to such a category as the soul, and in this case the will becomes a part of the soul; and the concept of the will was also considered in its relation to the notion of power: in this case the will is the awareness of desire and aspiration for its realization.