Ideas and Ideals

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.

The article considers the problem of citizen participation in the political process associated with social communication difficulties. An individual is moving away from the social system, due to the obtained negative experiences after the confrontation with the latent component of political participation. The author analyzes the historical characteristics of the personal identity and public opinion ratio. He also highlights the relationship of political participation and family traditions. State pressure on the individual consciousness turns into a hidden form of social loneliness. The more radical a political doctrine is the more negative attitude to social loneliness it demonstrates. Enforcement of social lifestyle, active participation in mutual social activities form settled fear before the State, a group, possessing the right to coercion, the world view regulation, and to the invasion of privacy. Political changes transform the kinds of social participation, values and meanings of social activities. Social distance may be considered as a potential prerequisite of a conflict between an individual and a society. We can speak about a new phenomenon, hidden social loneliness, i.e. a gap between intrinsic beliefs and demonstrated behavior. The feeling of hidden social loneliness transforms a person into an ostentatious performer; it makes a person feel forced publicity. A political system in some cases can hinder the development of social communication.

The article is devoted to the problem of an alliance of a man and a machine. We find this motive in the texts by such theorists as Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Manuel DeLanda and others. To clarify the idea of machine enslavement and the modeled way of emancipation by constituting the transindividual collectives or technical exodus, we appeal to Robert M. Pirsig’s novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” which content appears to be close to the mentioned theorists’ ideas. Pirsig, as well as James Graham Ballard, the author of a brilliant novel "Crash," where an original model of perverse machine sexuality was presented, denies a suspicious glance at the techniques and rethinks the relationship between a man and a machine. In this sense, his work can refer to anti-Heideggerian trend. Gilbert Simondon is a bright representative of this trend in philosophy. The ideas of the authors, whose concepts are considered in this paper, urge us to take into account a relatively simple idea: not the technical objects are a source of human alienation at all; a lot depends on the approach to the car.

The article deals with the problem of co-existential intercourse and the problem of nothingness. Co-existential intercourse is defined as the universal mode of subjects’ coexistence in their fundamental opportunity. The main problem of the study can be defined as follows: is it possible to express irrational content of co-existential experience using rational concepts? The author suggests the solution to this problem: on the one hand, the unique content of co-existential experience is expressed using the logical concepts, but on the other hand, there is an opposition between "existential" thinking and validity of rational concepts. The author deliberately goes beyond the scientific discourse with the aim of a deeper penetration into the existential logic "of discussing" ancestral forms and methods of co-existence. Thus, the existential method is used in order to reproduce a unique content experience of co-existence in thinking in the aspects available to rationalization. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the role and meaning of “nothingness” in close connection with subjects’ freedom. Nothingness becomes the principal condition of subjects’ freedom and choice. The main attribute of nothingness is the negation of unique coexistential experience. Besides, nothingness is defined as the ultimate meaning of negation of coexistential experience. The global meaning of nothingness becomes evident through a great variety of “private negations” which tend to be its concrete and finite forms. A solitary coexistential act may be considered as the act of negation of nothingness. Moreover, due to nothingness existential intercourse as the primary mode of communication may transform into unique co-existential experience.

The monograph is devoted to the research of an international order problem as the most exigent for the theory and practice of international relations. The work has been performed at the intersection of subject fields of International Relations Theory, International Law and World Politics. The authors consider this range of problems conventional for all international relations schools - from classical political realism and political idealism to liberal institutionalism and neo-Marxism. The paper studied the ideas of T. Hobbes and I. Kant about the world order in detail. It has been shown that they formulated the classical approaches to the understanding of international security, which are also relevant to the contemporary political theory. The choice of the world political discourse predetermined an integrated approach to the study of this subject: the world order is studied in its relation to the evolution of the modern system of international relations and in connection with the main basis of foreign policy planning – security dilemma. The authors propose a classification of the world order, aimed at both the theoretical study of international relations and the understanding of the dynamics of the modern system of international cooperation after the Cold War.

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.

"The book is dedicated to the memory of an outstanding Russian philosopher Aleksandr Pavlovich Ogurtsov (1936 - 2014); his friends, colleagues and students, with whom he felt free to live and think, contributed to this book. Philosophy for A. P. Ogurtsov was the ultimate method of the relationship between a man and the world, themes meanings of this attitude to the world, society, and culture, to himself and to the Other. He paid special attention to the Philosophy of Science, which, as his friends say, did not even slightly resemble the positivist universal taxonomy which has been rediscovered anew today and students, undergraduates and graduate students are forced to study it. The main idea was the sense of a "mainland layer", the historical position of any fundamental scientific knowledge, which manifests itself in logic, and it might be open to the philosopher and closed to the classifier. The way of A. P. Ogurtsov’s thoughts was the way of his life ─ it is not by chance that many of his articles are devoted to his being a philosopher. "