Ideas and Ideals

The participants in the Round table “The Value of Scientific Journal” discuss a number of problems that are currently encountered by authors and publishers of corresponding journals. Will scientific journal be preserved in its present form in the competitive environment with drastic growth of electronic communications? Is a printed on paper journal the best way to present scientific results? Are its functions changing? What is the audience of authors and readers of scientific journals in recent time? These questions get different answers. The traditional functions of a scientific journal can now be carried out in new forms, and it is not clear what will remain of the habitual printed copy in the nearest future. In particular, this concerns the function of presenting scientific knowledge, which is gradually moving to specialized electronic portals. The issue of the relationship between socio-humanitarian journals and journals which present natural sciences is discussed separately. The standardization and formalization of the presentation of results for humanitarian articles is in most cases unacceptable, but it is this feature that is one of the most important when including the journal in most significant international databases. The same applies to journals that popularize science at the serious level. The problem of scientometrics’ objectivity is discussed. What does the fact of a higher citation level, for example, in economics, mean when Keynes and Marx are inferior to many modern researchers according to the Hirsch index? The participants discuss the problem of the scientific level of authors in Russian conditions, the problem of the lack of originality of publications, and some other issues.

Stanza della Segnatura ("Signature Room") painted by Raphael, is one of the most famous works of the great master. At the same time, the relations between the paintings on the four frescoes and other images in this room, as well as this room itself, form a kind of “abstract object” that can be decoded. The key to this decoding can be the text on the slate, which is presented on one of the frescoes, the most famous of the cycle, known as the "School of Athens." Perhaps we will never know for sure whether Raphael himself invented all the mathematical schemes that can be found in this room, or whether he simply carried out the arithmetic plans that were imposed on him by the Pope or his advisers. Nevertheless, we can assume with a high degree of certainty that the visual iconography in Stanza della Segnatura with a reliable “margin of error” is indeed consistent with the central features of the mathematical theory of music described in Plato's “Timaeus”. It can be shown that the relations between the frescoes obey quite definite mathematical relations. If Stansa della Segnature is really a "room for a signature", then this "signature" is a musically harmonious ‘World soul’, described in the Plato’s “Timaeus”

The paper presents the author's vision of the sources of the dichotomy of the institutions of science and higher education, which were formed under the direct influence of the mobilization paradigm in Soviet society. The author analyses the doctrinal factors and the specifics of genesis and evolution of the institutionalized activities of the production, storage and transfer of scientific knowledge, which resulted in the minimized role of institutions of higher education in the Soviet system of scientific production. The paper gives interpretation of the basic concepts: dichotomy, social institution of science, social institution of education, mobilization, mobilization paradigm of development, modernization. Using the methods of interdisciplinary analysis involving the categories of sociology and social philosophy, social history of science, economic history and history of civil society, the author shows the doctrinal basis for the mismatch of two closely related components of the scientific and educational complex – scientific research and educational activities. The author draws attention to the fact, that there was a deviation from the classical university model, which combines the functions of generation, transfer and storage of scientific knowledge. According to the author, the quintessence was an instrumental and utilitarian approach to science and higher professional education, technologization, indoctrination and segmentation of scientific activity and professional education, which determined the key “starting points” and the boundaries of scientific, technical, scientific and educational activities. The paper highlights the relationship between the phenomena of mobilization and modernization in Soviet practice and the identification of the imperatives of the formation of the Soviet “protopolitics” in the field of science and higher professional education. The author shows manifestation of the mobilization paradigm of development in the field of science and higher professional education in the period of “late Stalinism”, associated with the formation of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). The latter can hardly be regarded as a deviation from the mobilization paradigm: the creation of the Physics and Technology Institute became a priority point of growth in the interests of the military sector of the economy with limited opportunities to transfer the experience of scientific and organizational decisions to the civilian sector. The author concludes that social institutions of science and education, which developed in the conditions of the mobilization paradigm, demonstrated conservatism and stability throughout the Soviet era. And despite the objective needs for the model change the institutions did not allow significant deviations from the determined development vector.

  The formation of an inclusive space of European and Russian cities is considered as a social process that has acquired a global scale. Almost all universities are involved in this process, but each of them has its own strategy and understanding of the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the educational space. The article raises the problem of comparing the models of strategies and the level of development of inclusive education in European and Russian universities. The comparative analysis is carried out on the example of French and Russian universities, in order to carry out the analysis, normative documents, University reports, as well as information displayed on the sites were used. The development of inclusive education is associated with the formation of an inclusive space, while it is proposed to take into account the context of urban space. The authors highlight the influence of universities on the development of inclusive culture of the territories as well as the common problems of the development of inclusive space of Russian and European universities, and the reasons for the slight backlog of Russian universities. The presented analysis is of practical importance in the context of the emergence of joint projects in this area between Russia and France.

  Electoral culture in modern Russian society is associated with a critical transformation of social and cultural values that form a democratic political consciousness. The focus is on the socio-cultural practice of free will of a person in society – its genesis and forms of manifestation in a society of stateless type. The authors come to the following conclusions: electoral practices were inherent to the archaic people and it is possible to consider the starting point of evolution of electoral culture of mankind from those times; the electoral culture of a stateless society is a mixed type of culture, the basis of which is the coordinated cooperative nature of the subjects acting as equal ones in social status; in a stateless type of society, the indicators of human freedom, personal autonomy of a person are higher than in the state, and the degree of alienation of a person from power and society is much less; self-organization of a stateless society included a number of elements – self-government and self-control, mechanisms of self-regulation and self-testing, which indicate a sufficiently high level of electoral culture in stateless societies, in which a “custom” can be interpreted as a legal rule or a proto-law.

The article is devoted to the study of the position of R. Rorty in relation to two different methods of philosophical discourse - argumentation and “conversation”. The first of these correlates with the epistemological tradition, the heir of which is declared analytical philosophy, while the second - with continental philosophy. The research method consists in the analysis of Rorty’s neo-pragmatist rhetoric, which claims to find a balance between the argumentative style in philosophy and the understanding of philosophy as a “conversation of humanity”. Rorty’s motivation for this understanding is that philosophers-as-poets do not follow the standards of philosophical argumentation and offer new types of conversations. The author traces the origins of the concept of Rorty’s philosophy as a “conversation”, going back to the appeal of M. Heidegger and G. Gadamer to the poetry of F. Hölderlin. The article shows, that despite the slogan “philosophy as a conversation of humanity” in the spirit of hermeneutics, Rorty does not in any way reject argumentative practice. Moreover, he is trying with analytical precision to make the “conversations” believable, presenting them in the framework of an argumentative reasoning. On the other hand, Rorty cannot afford the full approval of the argumentative practice of analytic philosophers to the detriment of the evasive linguistic practice of continental philosophers. In this regard, Rorty was forced to keep a certain kind of neutrality. Such a neutrality of Rorty is analyzed in his evaluation of the work of J. Derrida, in which he calls many of Derrida’s arguments (in controversy with his opponent J. Searle) awful, and yet Derrida remains one of his heroes. Rorty shows a scornful attitude towards Serl to prevent analytical philosophy from winning too much. The article concludes that Rorty’s interpretation of opposing argumentation and “conversation” in philosophical discourse is a reflection of his philosophical “ecumenism”. Rorty was between two opposing trends in characterizing the essence of philosophy, not daring to choose between argumentation and conversation. The famous slogan of Rorty - philosophy is the conversation of mankind - is supported by his considerable argument. Such a mixture of genres speaks of the instability of the concept of neopragmatist rhetoric, which among its followers takes the form of a new style of philosophizing.

Kutyrev Vladimir Aleksandrovich is known as a social philosopher, a leftist conservative, a supporter of controlled progress. His papers and books are an event for the Russian intellectual life. The subject of the study is the monograph by Kutyrev, “The Owl of Minerva Starts Flying at Dusk” published in 2018. I offer an extenstive phenomenological analysis of what was said and unsaid by Kutyrev in the same manner as the author himself analyzes the soap bubble of modern anthropoactivity (homo bullo) by removing the casing behind the shell of the civilization bulb of innovationism. Removing and discarding layer by layer, we advance towards the system of human stability. Kutyrev's philosophy is presented as the reactivization of a narrow path between agnosticism and technocracy, reism and structuralism. The target of his book is, as always, the salvation of Man. The difference in this monograph is in the details. In his previous works he saved us from technology, emptiness, progress. Yet here he saves us from self-apocalypse, an eschatological man-made tragedy. The article provides an overview of the main subjects of the author's work: the struggle between the natural and the artificial, the open vs. the sustainable society, self-development of technology, the threat of hypermodernism and transhumanism, the problems of biotechnical design of a Post-Man, the prospects for conservative philosophizing, and justification of life. The basis of the monograph consists of the following deep ideas: being is a blessing; self-assertion is the essence of every living being; eternal regression is a solid platform instead of progressivism. The author of the book uses a hermeneutic analysis as a research method and he analyses the apologetics of slow life, thoughtful reading and aesthetics of Ecce homo. The book reflects Heidegger’s primordial understanding as a primer in relation to which Husserl is contrasted as speculative and scholastic. Grassroots of traditional poetry resist abstract logo-centrism, where factuality competes with contingency. Kutyrev takes revenge for  Jean Jaurès Jean and Karl Marx, Dostoevsky and Christ, trying to resist the Holocaust of traditional objective reality and the corresponding metaphysical philosophy. Humanity sculpts the image of chaos, not paying attention to the fact that the way of thinking magnetizes the course of action and the fatalism of the body-subject matter becomes closer as more and more papers on speculative-body nigitology come out. Conclusions: 1) if you want to understand Heidegger, read Kutyrev; 2) being is good, 3) eternal regression is a more solid platform instead of reckless progressivism.

The subject of this article is the ideological proximity of religion and technology in culture. The author examines the dialectical interaction of the cultural worlds of religion and technology, compares the religious and technological worldviews, explores the typology of religious and technological subjects. Special attention is paid to the representation of the interaction of religion and technology in the European history of ideas, as well as the ontological status of thinking in the cultural practices of religion and technology. A special contribution of the author in the study of the topic is the search for new methodological approaches to the conceptualization of the interaction of religion and technology. On the basis of the dialectical, comparative historical, genealogical, structuralist methods, the study revealed that religion, like technology, in its historical formation is repelled not from thinking, not from the hidden truth of being, but from the activist will of its subjects. That is, they rely not on the revelation of being, but on its doing, on its further transformation. Hence, the main problem of the research lies in the cultural analysis of the mental installations of technological and religious subjects; in the analysis of the status of thinking in their subjective practices; in the consideration of their value attitudes. In addition, the work extended the popular instrumentalist understanding of technology to a separate activist value outlook. The author rejects the quantitative average material measurement of the technology in favor of its qualitative ideological measurement. As a result of the analysis of different methodological approaches and concepts, it is possible to establish a certain ideological proximity between the cultural worlds of religion and technology, as well as between their actors. The main conclusions of the conducted research are: 1) the research gives reasonable examples of historical and culturological comparativistics of the named objects from the European history of ideas and modern philosophy of technology; 2) it reveals the similarity of values of religious and technological subjects, expressed in the rejection of thinking and being, characteristic of the substantialist worldview of antiquity. The novelty of the research lies in expanding the problems of studying religious phenomena, in developing new views on the theory of the origin of religion.

The article is a study of the “Divine Service of Thanksgiving ...”, dedicated to the Poltava victory of 1709, according to a handwritten copy (the first half of the XVIII century) from the Chekuevo village, Onega district of the Arkhangelsk region. Hermeneutic analysis of the service text and the study of the manuscript history reveal the significant characteristics of the Peter's time culture. The service text, attributed to Archbishop Theophilactus (Lopatinsky), is strictly canonical, but while meeting the traditional service form, the author creates his work in accordance with the Baroque aesthetics of the modern era. Using the moral and rhetorical exegesis principles allows Archbishop Theophilactus to extract “all the potency of the visual” (A.V. Mikhailov) from the verbal image. Traditional expressions in the battle description acquire visual expressiveness. At the same time, the author does not draw the detailed battle pictures, but only names the most significant semantic points. One of such significant events for the author is the fact of Charles XII wound in the leg. It is subjected to multilayer allegorical interpretation in the text. “Emblematic” thinking of the era is manifested in a special attention to the exegesis of the Swedish heraldic lion. Freedom of association and a wide scope of combining meanings is the essence of the Baroque combination game as a manifestation of creative thought, the very essence of human culture. Throughout the eighteenth century, the text of the “Divine Service of Thanksgiving ...”, published in 1709, 1711 and 1717, was distributed in manuscript copies. One of such lists is the manuscript found by this article authors in the Chekuevo village. The manuscript history connects such historical subjects as Peter I's visit to the Russian North and the Solovetsky monastery and the events of the Northern war. It reveals the Northern peasantry's awareness of involvement in the naval successes of Russia, and demonstrates the specifics of the peasant and monastery libraries functioning.

The article deals with the problem of correlation between the theory and practice of Russian federalism. The author shows the relationship between sovereignization and the formation of a new Russian statehood at the beginning of the 1990s. The author also highlights the cyclicality of fluctuations from decentralization to over-centralization in relations between the center and the region. Federalism is seen as an institution, as a normative model, and as a practice. The paper draws particular attention to the historical context of the formation of the Russian statehood: “the parade of sovereignties”, the collapse of the USSR, the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the Federative Treaty on the authority demarcation with the Republic of Tatarstan. The author suggests that the inertia of decentralization after the collapse of the USSR not overcome by the Russian Federation in the 1990s prompted the federal center to borrow elements of unitarism. In the 2000s negotiability inability of elites in all authority levels was forcibly compensating by construction of “power vertical”. However, already by the mid-2000s the management centralization turns into a self-sufficient trend. The comprehension of the phenomenon of Russian federalism, the compliances of institutional practices with constitutional principles, the search for its optimal model and other issues served as a starting point for an interdisciplinary discussion. To date, several directions have been formed, each of which has its own argumentation in the dispute between supporters and opponents of federalism, who believe, that the unitary model of Russia's structure to be more optimal. It has been suggested that the negative experience of decentralization of the 1990s is associated in academic and everyday discourse with federalization. Such a setup prevents the objective understanding of this phenomenon as a factor that has played a positive role in the formation of the new post-Soviet statehood of Russia. The thesis is substantiated by the fact that with the entry of the Crimea into Russia, the federalist discourse acquired a new breath. To prove this argument, the author refers to cases illustrating the desire of individual subjects to use the institutions of federalism to build parity relations with the center to solve issues that are under the joint jurisdiction of Moscow and the regions. The author comes to the conclusion about maturing of prerequisites for a new cycle in the development of federal relations. The lack of budgetary funds, which the majority of subjects is experiencing now, makes them exercise their authorities, pushes regions to the need to expand the scope of their rights. The strategies of interaction between the federal center and the subjects of the Russian Federation are proposed to be described in the metaphors of bargaining and partnership.

The article is a comprehension of one of the tenets of philosophical materialism, one of the three conservation laws - the energy conservation law. It is an integral part of modern natural science. The author emphasizes the ontological status of the mathematical foundation of the law of energy conservation, and gives unexpected and very interesting extrapolations and applications of it. The author insists that the law of energy conservation does not have only an ontological and epistemological, but also a moral dimension. The author begins his article with admiration for the beauty and harmony of mathematics and deals with many fascinating and demonstrative mathematical achievements in the development of the greatest minds of mankind - Pythagoras, Leibniz, Newton, Fibonacci, Bach, Newlands, Mendeleev and others. Simplicity and elegance of Mathematics were also appreciated by naturalists. The author cites the position on this account of two prominent representatives of empirio-criticism of the second half of the XIX century - Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius - with their conceptual methodological platform of the “principle of economy of thinking” as a fundamental regulative science. In the future, the author tries to highlight the amazing aspects of the law of energy conservation within the framework of Plato’s philosophical theories about the “world as eidos”, Descartes about the potential of “innate ideas”, Hegel’s philosophy of history, the concept of L.N. Gumilev about ethnogenesis and passionarity and V. I. Vernadsky biosphere theory with his “law of constancy.” From the standpoint of the law of energy conservation the author substantiates providentialism within the framework of Christian apocalyptic dogma. The entire content of the article is not just permeated by the personal assessment of the author on all the mentioned personalities and their theoretical constructs, the author takes the liberty to present his original conceptual idea on this topic to the readers.