Ideas and Ideals

This article examines the dynamics of the process of geographical perception of Siberia, in the aspect of the forming of the idea of Siberia as geographical and cultural unity. There are presented, in particular, quite legendary testimonies of foreign travelers who almost up to the end of the 17th century were getting pretty random information from Russian merchants; some data from the proper Siberian Chronicles is also given. Taking into account the idea of empire as a political structure that prevailed in the last 2,500 years of human history, author deals with the cultural and political factors which has determined the integrity of the idea of Siberia as a specific megaregion. Particularly the question of the nature of the development of Siberia in terms of the corresponding type of colonization is examined. It is concluded that the population of Siberia, despite the fact that it was used and even became in the first place famous as a region of exile, the consciousness of Siberians is not typical for colonial territory. Since the end of the 18th century the representation of a Siberian as a special group of the Russian population is firmly established.

In the interview Prof. Shadrikov speaks about the recent educational reform in the Russian Federation. Its shortcomings are discussed, and the problem how it should be organized. The modern pre-school, school and higher education should be tailored to age and take into account the uncertainty of the cultural characteristics of different social groups and individuals. The difficulties of developing the contents of education and training are also under analysis, which is a very serious challenge in the new informational environment. The need is emphasized to get away from the fiscal targets and not setting the task to save, but rather to achieve high quality education. The situation with the standards is also touched, especially in the area of higher education, and the important conclusion is given that the standard is proposed in the terms of competencies yet the results are checked in terms of knowledge, and this situation determines the discrepancy between the opportunities provided by well-developed standards, and the real possibility to implement them. The situation in higher education connected with the realization of Bologna process, from which in recent time only two-level educational system is borrowed, yet everything else, basically the spirit of the Bologna process, is thrown away and forgotten, including the good financing and development of national education systems.

In the article the author analyzes the key semantic aspect of the concept “event” in the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin. This aspect is related to the understanding of the being as self-transcendence. The author shows that Bakhtin defines a person’s position as his productive participation in the existence of being as a whole. Such a determination presupposes an understanding of the being as an open, closed, noninteger whole. In this perspective, the idea of equal to itself existence of being is fantastic and unrelated to reality. A truly relevant is the idea of being on the whole that comes true. The being on the whole never is, but always occurs due to participation of a responsible subject.

The article is devoted to the prospects of further development of the conceptualization of the notion of heredity in a wide range of biological and socio-humanitarian aspects in synthesis of them. The transition from one stage of knowledge to another, deeper one, is carried out in just such a way. The new aspects of reality that are displayed in terms in the process of cognition are fixed in terms. The notion of inheritance is a fundamental notion of genetics. Therefore, the scientific language is a kind of science's basic information code. This notion is in unity with the notions of variation and selection, and indicates the phenomenon of transmission to offspring of the material factors that determine the development of the characteristics of the organism in specific environmental conditions. The analysis of historically developing ideas about heredity is an important philosophical and methodological problem of genetics. A scientific language is an open system of concepts, which is constantly growing due to the inclusion of new knowledge about aspects of reality and is deepening due to the detection of new properties, structural elements, etc. This means that the history of science can be presented as the history of the development of its notions. The clarification of the historical path of development of science and its conceptual apparatus, of extent of its impact to solve practical problems, of its contribution to the development of knowledge and culture in general makes possible adequately assess its current state, identify its problems and points of growth, and contribute to the definition of its development prospects. The article analyzes the prospects for conceptualizing the concept "inheritance" and proposes a program of studies of these prospects; the program is based on the concepts of the outstanding modern geneticists.

Justice as a theme and a subject of research is, in fact, a cluster of concepts, which organize a specific multi-actant historical process. It deals with certain forms of human self-understanding and methods of turning less equitable social relations into more equitable ones. One of the basic problems here is to clarify and to explicate existing forms of understanding of Justice, and then to organize a communicative space for an ongoing process of discussions on the national and even transnational level. While doing so the social life might have been reorganized in the mode of strengthening respect to the competing ideas of Justice, which are revealed as the result of those discussions. On the other hand, Truth within social sciences could be understood as a matrix of openness of the world-as-a-whole, i.e. as a sort of collective optics which allows to identify things as things, facts as facts, events as events, and, therefore, generates collective forms of in-the-world orientation, common for a given nation, or a given historical moment, etc. But altogether this produces deep conflicts between scientific knowledge and “folk” estimates of social and historical reality because historical and social “facts” themselves are still not defined.

The article discusses what the technology is and how one can build a humanitarian technology. It is shown that the technology is introduced as a new reality, which describes the industrial activities in the language of operations, their conditions, division of labor and management; at the same time, technology is characterized by the quality of installation, cost savings, standardization, rational description of the production processes, optimizing them for the training of new professionals – technologists. The author characterizes the features of the humanitarian approach and cognition. Though it is impossible to introduce a unique personality, which is characteristic of the humanitarian approach, into the technology, it is quite possible to provide a functional place for it. And it is better to consider not "a unique personality", the behavior of which, is difficult to foretell, but “a common personality", which is characterized by certain behaviors, because such a person always acts in the way, defined by the set rules predetermined by social conditions. In order to construct a realistic, humanitarian technology with a practical application, it is necessary to organize two activities: training and institutional support as well as the organizational one. The author illustrates these statements with the example of constructing a humanitarian technology and discusses the conditions for its implementation.

The article is devoted to the role of the initial empirical data in the process of scientific knowledge and scientific prognostication, autonomy of these data to a certain extent in relation to theory. The author gives a scheme of the relationship of the initial data, creative intuition, scientific theories, reduction rules and the empirical consequences of the theory in the process of scientific knowledge. This scheme is valid to a certain extent and for a process development research prognosis and for making decision on the basis of this prognosis.The author of the article systematically analyses Popper's scheme of growth of scientific knowledge and shows that this scheme is broken, if we accept Popper's assertion that the so-called data and facts are theoretical interpretations. Specific examples proved that our senses and their testimony are to a certain extent autonomous in relation to the theories and myths. With the help of a concrete example it is shown that the perceptual component must be present in every empirical fact and that factual language is a complex phenomenon: its concepts are developed under the influence of this theory, other theories, practical activities, sensory experience and everyday experience.

The article examines the impact of the development of the Internet technologies on the ways of communication and social interaction in a society. The increasing of information flows and the speed of information exchange stimulate people to search for new forms of self-organization. Among these forms, there are some significant ones like virtual communities in social networks. This process intensifies different effects for all users of the network groups. Users in search of a circle of "friends" and personal identification resort to various methods of self-categorization experiencing the affect of different methods of influence and manipulation (both positive and negative). To maintain the balance of interests it is necessary to increase media literacy, mastering critical perception and analysis.

This article is a continuation of the article "Russian Universities and the Russian Intelligentsia" Part 1, published in this journal, №3, 2016. The author discusses the problem of the Russian intelligentsia formation and the role, which the Russian university community played in the process. He also demonstrated the origins of the "groundlessness", which has always distinguished the Russian intelligentsia, and analyzed the reasons for its invariable opposition to any authority. The author proves the thesis that the revolutionaries of all stripes represented a semi-intelligentsia: instead of thick books, these people read the brochures, and they replaced the philosophy with the party ideology. Semi-intelligentsia played a leading role in all French Revolutions, and later in the Russian one. The article analyzes the destiny of Russian universities during the years of Soviet power. The years of "stagnation" meant already the agony of Russian universities, which had lost all the impulses to scientific activities. The experimenters were without instruments, theorists were without books ─ they were isolated from the world; they were under a bureaucratic ban. The author gives a brilliant analysis of the role and significance of the Russian intelligentsia in the Russian and world history. In his opinion, the main distinctive characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia was unselfishness. In the West, “freedom” and “equality” meant protecting group and class interests; in Russia, however, these words were understood as “brotherhood” with all oppressed people without any self-interest.

The subject of this issue is a question on a substance of every being, its specific features and conditions of its cognition and existence. This is an attempt to systematize Aristotle's point of view about this problem, presented in different fragments of his treatises "Physics", "Metaphysics", "Categories", "On the Soul". Aristotle pointed out the fallacy of identifying the substance and any beings. He explained, that not any being can be considered as a substance, though sometimes it's rather difficult to distinguish them. Aristotle offered different classifications of kinds of substance and examined their main features and conditions of their being. Two approaches about comprehension of substances are compared in this article. Socrates and Plato’s position is based on the principle of the direct speculative comprehension. Aristotle offered the system of categories as the universal way for description and cognition of the essence of any substance. To be means to be as a definite "what" in a completeness of its "whatness". Everything can exist only as a definite something. Instead, a problem of possibility of changes and movement of substances is discussed in a comparison of positions of Aristotle and Plato. After all we can see the being of substances not to be a simple static presence of empty pure forms, no having any material substratum. They presented a unity of the intention to achieve its entelecheia and achievement of one, i.e. a unity of the goal, process and result.