Ideas and Ideals

The article analyzes G.D. Gachev’s reflection of philosophical thought genesis in its ethnic and cultural conditionality. The authors believe research experience of G.D. Gachev to be the implementation of methodological directions by Moscow logic study group to update the genesis of knowledge not on the basis of formal logic but content genetic logic. G.D. Gachev considers that the form and content of philosophical thought emerge in the bosom of national culture and preserve its characteristics.

The article explores the role of Russia in the post-Soviet space, the purpose and the results of cooperation with the newly independent countries in 25 years after the liquidation of the Soviet Union. The main task is to analyze the Russian policy towards the countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union, measures aimed at the development of mutually advantageous cooperation, and their outcomes. It is important to develop the further strategy of Russia taking into account all the pitfalls in the interaction of Russia with all the newly independent countries taken together, to understand the reasons why there have been arising some periodical economic, political and cultural contradictions, and sometimes even conflicts. Today, it has become vital in the period of the new world order formation, in the conditions of worsening relations with Ukraine. The article substantiates the reasons for the lack of efficiency of interaction between Russia and CIS countries in the 1990s in the economic and military-political spheres. The author also highlights the historical significance of the efforts to preserve the declared unity of post-Soviet space in the organizational documents. The article shows the changes that have been made in Russia's policy towards the CIS countries since 2000s, the intense integration of regional parts of the countries to jointly emerge from the crisis, the creation of the collective security system of a group of countries of the former Soviet Union, awareness of the need to move towards multi-level cooperation with these countries as they are ready to join in the interests of mutually beneficial cooperation.

This paper deals with the post-war period (late 1940s – mid 1950s) in the development of Soviet digital electronic computational tools and formation of the USSR science and technology policy in this field. The authors studied how well the Soviet scientists and managers were aware of the new aspects of this policy, detected its primary application area – the Soviet Atomic project and considered the conditions of its formation. Evidently, information about the new computational tools came to the Soviet Union from abroad. One of the sources of such information was academic and science and technical journals. Possibly, intelligence agencies played a certain role in obtaining this information. It was then that some contradictions between approaches to computer hardware appeared. On the one hand, leaders of the Atomic project realized its benefits and planned to produce and apply it, though in a limited scope. On the other hand, advocates of the development of computer hardware affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences and Ministry for Machine Building and Instrument Making were in favor of a more comprehensive approach, which implied the creation of new types of computers, increasing their capacity and extending prospective applications beyond the military-industrial complex. Participation of the two establishments in the development of computer hardware was highly competitive, with each body pursuing its own goals and lacking resources. The fact that the developments by S.A. Lebedev got ultimately higher priority testifies to the deep insight of the USSR Academy of Sciences into scientific and engineering problems. Ideological pressure, characteristic of the late period of Stalin’s rule with respect to some areas of science, did not have any serious implications for the development of computer hardware. The general situation with electronic computational tools confirms the fact that Soviet engineering in the period of late Stalinism was of the catch-up nature.

The author analyses the student movement in 1960s in the Novosibirsk State University (NGU), the longest open legal student movement of the Soviet period. The previous publications on this subject do not present the movement in its entirety, and they also do not reflect the nature of the phenomenon properly. The civil movement in Akademgorodok (Academic Town) and, in particular, at the NGU was a by-product of the famous Siberian experiment. Nowadays, this by-product is quite topical in search for the best strategy of social change. The article reconstructs and analyses the preconditions and factors of the student movement, as well as the spectrum and directions of its political activities: self-organization and self-management, club activities, participation in the Rector’s elections, protection of student political and academic freedoms, preservation of the autonomy of the university, etc. The conclusions about the nature of the movement are made based on numerous memoirs and available documents.

The article discusses the attitudes of different nations and national cultures to the memory of the Fallen on the battlefield. The author emphasizes the historical, cultural and religious peculiarities of the formation of traditions and customs of honoring and preserving the memory of them. It is concluded that the attitude to the memory of the Fallen demonstrates the level of development of national culture.

The article is devoted to the moral and ethical search and God-seeking of a prominent socialist-revolutionary Boris Savinkov. He earned a reputation not only as one of the leaders of the PSR “Fighting organization”, who participated in the organization of the most resonant attacks – on Interior Minister V.K. Pleve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, but also as a writer whose works "The Pale Horse" and "That Which Was Not (Three Brothers)" had a great public resonance. The contradictory nature of his personality, attitudes and actions, clearly manifested in the fact that he simultaneously combined leadership of “Fighting organization” and public reflection on moral inadmissibility of the murder, and in the fact that his anti-Bolshevik activities he combined with writing "The Black Horse", still attracts the attention of researchers and journalists. The circumstances of his death also attract the attention. The author explores them using the documents of "Savinkov case," initially stored in the secret archives of the Politburo of the CPSU (b), which allow us to speak with confidence about his suicide.

Modern science transformed our notion of the universe which appears now as an integrated, continuously developing system which is characterized by the interaction of the chance and the law. Philosophical comprehension of the new picture of the world demands essential changes in the worldview of people. Many western Christian theologians suppose that Christianity in this connection also must and may improve its doctrine of the Creator and creation. The author considers the conception elaborated by one of the most prominent specialists on the problem «science and the modern Christianity», an English scientist and an Anglican theologian A. Peacocke, which is directed at solving that problem. He motivates the legitimation of a new vision of God where the Creator appears as dynamic, limited in His power and knowledge, suffering, loving, personally connected with His creation, exploring it and developing with it. Peacocke’s conception enriches not only Christian theology but also our notion of it.

Principles of the formal structure of the axiological system are analyzed in the article. Ideology is considered as a variant of this system. It proved that political ideology unites all other options are ideological constructions, including the value of the right of submission. It is shown that the elemental composition corresponds to the structure of the political ideology of the political relationship. The formal structure of political ideology allows for meaningful interpretation and samples historical types of political value judgments are given in the paper.

This culturological essay identifies the interpretative codes of the Orphic myth in world culture. A century ago, Innokenty Annensky astutely observed that ancient myth determines not only the material, but also the forms of our creative thought. The criterion here is not accuracy, but depth... This is the space of discoveries, revelations, foreknowledge, and existential insights. The book explores the borders of the essayistic chronotope from Alexander Pushkin and Gérard de Nerval to Vladimir Nabokov and Wystan Hugh Auden. However, the logic of the how the study unfolds is dictated not by chronology, but by associative and unpredictable links of interpretative meanings. The Orphic myth reveals how the old truth and its new artistic and philosophical understanding can be linked together.

In various epochs, the peculiarities of human language were described in comparison with sounds made by animals. Such recourse to animals deserves special analysis, since, in essence, it is directed at a better understanding of man and human language. All the thoughts expressed in connection with this are equally important, as landmarks in the history of ideas, irrespective of the fact whether they had followers or remained as author’s original concepts. The man-animal paradigm, studied in the context of language, undergoes significant changes with the passage of time. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages a hierarchical attitude with the prior role of the man was established. In the modern era, alongside with the traditional interpretation, a version of correlation emerges: the talking bird and the man are placed on the same rank in the story about a cognitive parrot mentioned by Locke. In the beginning of the 20^th century Vossler goes even further. Creative ability serves as an evaluation criterion for him; proceeding from this he observes in man features characteristic of the parrot. However, in the structure of man conceived this way, the hierarchy of antique-medieval model is observed again.