Ideas and Ideals

The article analyses the origin and development of social topology as well as the reasons for choosing the paths of its further development. Taking into account the directions in mathematical topological thought which are defined as theoretical multiple and algebraic topology, we distinguish two main vectors in devising socio-topological views: the topology of space and the topology of form. The first is based on the works of Kurt Lewin and Pierre Bourdieu and represented as a configuration of units located in social space. The second originates from the works of Rene Tohm, which conceptualize the forms of objects and urge the research in isomorphic processes, figurativeness and equivalence of their models in a social reality context. The authors analyse the methods of applying the topology of space to modern sociological research ranging from visual physical understanding of place to abstract logical representation of the role and meaning of a social object.  They also reveal the reasons why sociologists and social philosophers have mastered and actively made use of space-topology methodology tools. The paper explains the origin of difficulty in realizing the ideas and theoretical methodological capacities of the topology of form in human and social sciences. The authors suggest and prove the conclusion that a one-sided attitude towards topology is non-productive and greatly weakens our sociological understanding, procedures and the results of topological studies of social objects

The author considers the formation and development of the “public sphere”, the construction of its theoretical image, prospects and threats in the epoch of IT prevalence. The author analyzes different concepts of “public sphere” and reveals its substantial similarities and differences. He also gives a thorough analysis of the most popular approaches (terms, ideas, concepts) to the definition of "public sphere" in scientific literature. The author comes to the conclusion, that the result of the long-run discussion is the understanding of the fact, that the rational and fair space for discussions, which was mentioned by J. Habernas, needs the new forms of its implementation. It is quite possible and logical to put it into action in the Internet. At the same time, the problem of threats and the limits of the virtual public sphere are still unsolved. Therefore, the society needs support and coordination of people in the interaction with the new embodiment of “the public sphere”. The concept of "public sphere" is used rather often, but being highly controversial it gives rise to the need for careful consideration of its content for systematizing ideas and concepts that relate to it and predict further ways of its development or transformation to the virtual public sphere in the space of the Internet.

The article presents the problems of critical discursive studies in political communication. In particular, the authors demonstrate the methods and strategies of administration through constructing authoritative metanarrative. Media institutions of linguistic (cultural) domination, according to the authors, ensure the stability of the existing hierarchical order and express the fundamental "will to power" in practice of public relations. The nature of domination is manifested in the tightening of control and regulation of communicative actions of citizens almost at the level of generation text and speech. The power authorities (the linguistic ones) in the modern context are not satisfied with the control of discourse as a social practice; they are increasingly interested in the process of subjectification (individualization) of the perception experience. Power wants to control texts and speech products in the media space, and also it sees itself as a generator of the subject's inner experience. The transformation of people into subjects is in essence a special way of representing them in the modern public legal space. The authors believe, that turning to the verbal technique of parresia, allows you to see alternative ways of self-constitution and self-presentation that existed in the traditional consciousness. The socio-cognitive nature of symbolic politics is considered in the general context of the development of the sociology of knowledge as a promising area of social humanitaristics. The authors carried out an analysis of the forms and mechanisms of the discursive reproduction of the elite power taking into account rich research experience of the Western theory of political communication.

The current state of academic life is characterized by the disintegration (counteraction) of acts of cognition as a sphere of spiritual being, on the one hand, and scientific research, which belongs primarily to the sphere of technogenic civilization, on the other. The absence of axiological foundations of scientific activities, which determine the goals and vectors of philosophical knowledge, is the reason for the exceptional technologicalism of research projects and the whole university culture. The observed today dehumanization of science reveals itself in the fact, that the ideal of truth, which is transcendental for academic institutions, is lost, in which the university, as a cognising subject, builds its own integrity. In such a situation, the spiritual foundations of knowledge are found only in the ethical regulation of scientific activity, which manifests itself in the form of external regulatory prescriptions. However, the real humanitarian (cultural) mission of the university is to transform the rational knowledge of the world into the ontology of values. Without the university as a special institution (in its various manifestations and historical modifications), the ideal of science, divided into innumerable information fields, loses its teleological completeness. In modern science, the potential of technology as an essence of "dynamic matter" is increasingly being realized, but the Spirit is not deployed in the system of cognitive practices, which fundamentally contradicts the very foundations of the University Idea, as it was in the classical period of its history.

The problem of the reliability of history, assessments of events and facts puts the researcher before the necessity of analyzing the very concept of history and its understanding as a bearer of the metaphysical. In the course of the analysis, a figure of the historian (Histor) - an elected arbitrator or an authoritative person, necessary for the initial court-judgment in a certain case was identified. Analysis of the Platonic dialogue "Sophist" allows us to discover the metaphysics of history through pairs of concepts such as: being and nothingness, movement and rest, identical and different, treating it as the art of creating images and as a myth caught and realized at the time of its appearance. Change of the image of history is facilitated by a speech that can change meanings. Historian (Histor) and sophist are two terms that have shown the limits of our understanding of being, which is atomic and which constantly forces us to make choices.

The central idea of this article is that the problem of representation of cyborg experience for us, non-modified humans, becomes solvable by the composition of two semiotic approaches: biosemiotics and actant semiotics. First, since "cyborg" implies cybernetic organism, we may consider technomodified humans to the сertain extent equivalent with animals. Therefore we can use the method of Umwelt-analysis: it was created by J.von Uexkull to reconstruct how the world is given to a living organism with particular bodily structure in "action-perception" functional circles. Within Umwelt-analysis, biosemiotics exposes the way in which perceived world appears to an organism as consisting of "material signs" where an organism itself is a sort of "communicative structure". The very possibility to describe Umwelt obtains because an environment and an organism stand in sign-relations with each other (which is also true for cyborgs). On the next step, we use tools of actant semiotics from works of B. Latour to clarify how Umwelt-descriptions produce immersive effects upon us, representing the experience of an organism. Latour claims that, once the flow of transformations from material actants to textual ones is done, the realism of scientific texts comes from a composition of characters, or, in semiotician terms, "inner frame of reference". Revealing of semiotic operations (shifting out, shifting in and figuration) in Umwelt-descriptions then displays how viewpoint of an organism on the world appears inside world-text and takes readers attention. We test proposed the approach on the example of people with magnetic implants, concluding with further perspectives of its application.

Hobsbawm’s modern world originated in the big bang of the eighteenth century, and it was extinguished in an implosion almost exactly two centuries later. To him these two hundred years were defined by the project of the Enlightenment which imagined a world that was equally good for all of humanity and not for just some part of it. More than revolution, the Enlightenment drove this world onward until it seems to have exhausted itself by the end of the twentieth century: the Marxist Hobsbawm is inspired more by the Enlightenment than by one of its consequences, the millenarian dream of revolution. Deriving from the Enlightenment, the conjoined industrial and French revolutions, known as the dual revolution in his work, generated all subsequent events. The industrial revolution assumed both capitalist and socialist forms, and the political revolution inaugurated by the French species spawned a series of bourgeois and socialist revolutions, attempts at revolution of both types, and revolutions against revolution, or counter-revolutions. They permeated not only the politics and the economy of the continent, but as much its social and cultural processes and the sciences and the arts. His magnificent oeuvre celebrates this universe bounded by the two revolutionary waves of the late eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries; but it is a celebration that broods on its dark side as much as on its stupendous achievements. His grand theme is the hope held out by the Enlightenment, the revolutions that sustained it, and the counter-revolutions that negated it. As this modern world drew to its close in the 1990s, a gloomy uncertainty hangs over the world, and his musings on the post-Cold War world reflect this unease.

 The work provides insight into the formation and development of the “public opinion” concept in the latter half of 18^th century. A comparative analysis of the articles ‘opinion’ and ‘public opinion’ in the “Encyclopedia” of Diderot & d'Alembert and in the “Encyclopédie Méthodique” provides an opportunity to trace evolution and the distance between the perceptions of two notions during the various periods of time. The article considers ‘opinion’ as “doubtful and uncertain judgment” and ‘opinions’ as points of view of judges underlying the judgement, which the French Encyclopaedists referred to legal and logical spheres, and their impact on the formation of the “public opinion” concept. The work provides an analysis of ideas of public opinion as a mechanism of public control of social and political realm, which peculiarity is independence from the sphere of state regulation and the lack of institutionalized means of influencing the institutions.

  Philosophy in the traditional society was based on other principles than in the modern one. As a part of the traditional culture, it created unity, because it originated from the single principle. It was linked with traditional Sciences, among which there was alchemy. Alchemy became prosperous in the Alexandrian epoch, in Greco-Roman Egypt. It was synthetic metaphysical cognition and at the same time practice of a man and cosmos transformation. Its aim was "healing" the world; it had to deal with qualities, not quantities. With the advent of Christianity, alchemy became persecuted. As a result, it degenerated into the practice of “metals transformation”. Alchemists were rightfully called philosophers. The subject of our study, therefore, is to extend the understanding of philosophy. The applied method consists in the disclosure of the metaphysical status of alchemy as a different type of thinking, not reducible to the categories of modern science. The same analysis has been made in relation to contemporary philosophy. The modern state of humanity is anti-traditional. This is the realm of quantity. There is neither a tradition of initiation, nor the intellectual elite, which put it into practice. Therefore, philosophy ceases to follow its calling, becoming a shell of individual opinions and judgments of non-universal nature. The result of this research is different understanding of philosophy and its role in the unity of culture, it differs from the understanding widely spread today. Nowadays it is understood as generalization of scientific knowledge. But philosophy cannot be subordinated to science as it was once subordinated to religion. Its mission is to find the truth. Modern philosophy bears the imprint of all negative aspects of culture: individualism, “the realm of quantity", the lack of unity, crisis in every direction, anti-traditionalism. Alchemy was the historical experience of transforming knowledge. It sought to overcome the limitations of individual existence.

On August 6, 2017 Boris G. Yudin (Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chief Research Fellow of the Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics Sector of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, editor-in-chief of the journal "Man", member of the “Ideas and Ideals” editorial board) died after a prolonged critical illness.