Ideas and Ideals

The article (using the example of the European cultural tradition) actualizes the problem of the heuristic potential of the concept of ‘soul’, which is far from being fully used, due to the dominance of positivist ideas. The category ‘soul’ is the most adequate in its content and depth, for the study of the inner immaterial world of a person in its integrity. The concept of ‘psyche’ that displaces and replaces it is narrower, covering mainly the processes of reflecting the world for optimal adaptation to it. The dominant of this concept, on the one hand, expresses the real impoverishment of a person’s inner life, the loss of moral, metaphysical experiences and reflections by it. On the other hand, the view through the ‘prism of the psyche’ has a limited cognitive potential, not allowing to reveal the fullness of the inner world of a person, his essential depths. The category ‘soul’ is the earliest, most developed, universal, allowing to explore the structure and functioning, formation and development of the inner world of a person. It is the concept of ‘soul’ that appears, starting from ancient and early Christian thought, synonymous with the concept of ‘human life’. The evolution of the content of the ‘sole’ concept in European thought is a reflection of the real processes taking place in the inner being of a person. During the period of anthroposociogenesis, the formation of the human soul takes place, consisting in the ‘gathering’ of its main parts. In the development of spiritual life, one can distinguish the line of ascent – to the spiritual, and the line of descent – to the material, carnal. The line of ascent unfolds from the first steps of history to the bright Middle Ages. The line of descent plays an increasingly active role from the ‘dark Middle Ages’ to the present. In the New and Modern times, the process of reducing the soul into the psyche is actualized. Moral and metaphysical experiences and reflections, which constitute the essence of the soul, lose their leading role. The ‘death of God’ (as the highest moral and metaphysical law) is an expression of the ‘death’ of the soul, leading to the ‘death’ of a person. The “justification” of the soul, its “new finding” will allow a person to realize a “new finding” of himself.

The English empiricist philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) formulated the logical problem of the interaction of essence and deontic: moral imperatives, norms, laws, values, goals, policies, etc. are not derived from facts. The existence quantor does not apply to statements with ‘should’, ‘must’. Similarly, artificial intelligence can operate with temporal, epistemic, and even aletic modalities, but cannot analyze deontic and axiological operators, etc. Hume’s guillotine forces a distinction between the normative and the descriptive and the deductive.

Law is the most normative and precise human science, where the present and the ideal are correlated. The desire to define its essence gives rise to fundamental questions about its location. Is it worthwhile to equate norm and being? Is it possible to derive law from social rationing? Can we see it in the psychological need for order and stability, in the subjective experience of duty? How can we bring together the being and the proper in the contradictory category of ‘law’, which means both the objective and the present, and, on the other hand, the valuable and the concrete. The social avatar of the dilemma of the ontic and the deontic is the gap between normative and sociological jurisprudence. The methodological purity of normativism collides with a fluid social reality. Special-legal means and procedures can create a police regime, but they cannot create a system of social justice. Law from the point of view of the proper is the recognition of the dependence of the legal on the social, the political, the economic. Without the proper, however, law loses its instrumentalism. Therefore, the state is like a mangrove biome, uniting heterogeneous environments of the essential and the proper. This article develops models of legal metatheory, or such a descriptor of law, which would explain the forms of the union of the existent and the deontic.

The article examines the current situation related to the prospects for further development of philosophical knowledge. It is pointed out that in the interpretation of a number of authors, philosophy is now actually reduced to the history of philosophy, turning into a purely historical discipline. Philosophical thought boils down to the analysis and systematization of what was created before, but not to the free search and creation directed to the future.

The current situation has been created due to the practice in which every thought does not arise by itself, but is necessarily based on previously expressed thoughts. Philosophy deals mainly not with the actual, but with the previously described and interpreted reality. Therefore, it is almost impossible for modern philosophers to create on virgin soil. In addition, the amount of philosophical knowledge has reached such a volume that it is almost impossible to keep it within individual human memory. A significant part of philosophical research at present is actually aimed at studying the history of philosophy, while such works sometimes do not contain their own thoughts at all. This situation is considered in philosophy as a systemic inversion: the service, subordinate element of the system acquires a dominant meaning in it.

Of course, the role of the history of philosophy in this discipline itself cannot be disputed. Philosophy is a kind of cumulative knowledge in which the past is inseparable from the present and the future. However, it is impossible to identify the history of philosophy with philosophy itself, because this approach closes any path leading to the future for philosophical thought. It is implied that philosophers from now on should be engaged exclusively in rethinking what was created earlier. The further development of philosophical thought with this approach is actually denied. However, Aristotle pointed out that even the complete denial of philosophy implies the use of philosophical argumentation, and therefore, willingly or unwittingly forces one to accept the existence of a philosophical discipline.

The most important point is that philosophy is a discipline of interest not only for philosophers themselves. Philosophy is not a ‘toy for philosophers’, it is a cognitive tool that is in demand in all other areas of human knowledge. And since science and practice as a whole continue to develop, philosophy will remain in demand precisely as a living, developing discipline, and not as a frozen collection of accumulated thoughts.

The subject of the study is the phenomenon of post-truth (reflective post-truth and valuative post-truth), considered from the perspective of philosophical methodology, for which the authors turn to the definition of this phenomenon and the analysis of its essence. The article indicates the difficulties that the very construction of this term causes. In addition, the indistinguishability of the notions ‘reflective truth’ and ‘valuative truth’ leads to incorrect translations of the term ‘post-truth’ into Russian. The authors of the article believe that the term ‘post-truth’ can be translated as ‘reflective post-truth’ and applied to reflective knowledge, revealing objects in their own logic of development, and as ‘valuative post-truth’ – in relation to value knowledge, revealing an axiological approach to the world. The analysis of the use of the term ‘post-truth’ has shown that there are at least three approaches: in a negative connotation, as a state of society in which the universally valid truth (objective truth) has ‘disappeared’, everyone interprets it in their own way, although ‘their’ interpretation is, in fact, an imposed interpretation; in a positive connotation, when in a state of post-truth, the truth is not denied, but it is stated that it has changed the form of its existence, dissolving into partial truths expressed by numerous subjects; in a neutral connotation, proceeding from the fact that the post-truth has always been, now, due to new information and communication technologies, it has simply become more noticeable. In conclusion, it is concluded that the situation of post-truth has created new conditions for the development of reflective knowledge, primarily due to the ‘democratization of science’, as well as value knowledge – including through the processes of self-communication. But the results obtained must be critically rethought. This means that it is necessary to return once again to the established rules of the game, analyze them from the perspective of possible risks, and take measures to prevent them. To this should be added the need to develop critical thinking, including among a wide audience of social networks.

The paper brings the analysis of the evolution of Bacons’ views on alchemy. The polemics against alchemy has become a central subject of his early writings (1584-1595) on the scientific knowledge. Bacon criticized occult traditions, an integral part of intellectual culture of early modern English establishment. Bacon argued that till his time all serious intellectual efforts of mankind had been directed to futile goals like alchemical transmutations, etc. or endless disputations of natural philosophers; at the same time all the greatest inventions (e.g., nautical needle, gunpowder and printing) had been made only by chance. Bacon believed government should have support of scientific & technological research and suppress alchemical fraud. Doing that a government would gain a most effective tool for increasing its power and wealth.

To support his views Bacon launched an intense propaganda campaign that culminated in the series of masques performed at Elizabethan court in 1592-1595. Baconian efforts caused counter actions of the court members who believed in the efficiency of alchemical enterprises.

During late 1590’s Bacon revised his attitude towards alchemy as well as towards the government, which was able in his opinion to support the development of sciences. The basis of his views is the ethical-theological concept of the values of scientific knowledge, which excludes previous ideas about the role of government in the development of sciences. Another area of research that changed his assessment of alchemy is the work on the problems of the scientific method. In the light of new political-philosophical, axiological and epistemological concepts, criticism of alchemy loses its former degree of relevance for Bacon. The developments made by Bacon in the 1580s-1590s during the polemic against alchemy become a kind of foundation on which he relies in the further development of his philosophical ideas.

The development of biology stimulates a naturalistic turn within the framework of philosophy, actualizes the problem of the dialogue between philosophical and scientific knowledge. In modern philosophy there is a tendency to imitate the empirical sciences. An attempt to conceptualize the empirical knowledge accumulated in modern brain sciences finds its expression within the neurophilosophy project. In classical philosophy, there was a skeptical assessment of the idea of a total reduction of the life of consciousness to the forms of motion of matter, which contributed to the preservation of dualism. The basis of modern neurobiology is the idea of the identity of physical and mental processes, the statement according to which information in our brain is encoded by the activity of neurons, neural networks. As a result, on the border of philosophy and science, corresponding ontological and epistemological programs are formed, designed to comprehend the classical philosophies of the opposition on naturalistic grounds. The author proposes an understanding of the naturalistic trend in modern epistemology, a reflection of the problem of the relationship between physical and mental processes on the example of the conceptualization of the achievements of modern neurosciences within the framework of the neurophilosophy project. The paper notes the diversity of interpretations of the concept of “neurophilosophy”, fixes the prerequisites for its occurrence, development problems and features of interpretation. In the definitions of the concept of “neurophilosophy” one can see a specific form of being of philosophy, the philosophy of neurosciences, a variant of biophilosophy, a form of the philosophy of consciousness. The paper highlights the problems that complicate the implementation of the neurophilosophy project: constant rethinking and supplementing the baggage of scientific knowledge about the brain, the lack of a unified theory of neurosciences, an interdisciplinary language, one-sided reductionism. To build neurophilosophy in the language of neuroscience means to liken it to a special scientific discipline. The project of neurophilosophy initiates, but does not offer models of a constructive dialogue between philosophy and neurosciences, reducing philosophical problems to the achievements of special scientific knowledge, which allows us to consider neurophilosophy, at this stage of its development, as a ‘scientific manifesto’, another attempt of science to do without philosophy. Against the background of the active appeal of philosophy to the special sciences, there is a need to build an empirical-ontological approach, which is based on the current achievements of the sciences, and makes it possible to bring empirical knowledge to the level of philosophical generalizations.

The subject of the article is objectification of rationality in artificial intelligent agents (AIA). The author considers two complementary trends in its context. The first ‘bottom-up’ trend is associated with attempts to artify rational reasoning and action in AIA, the second ‘top-down’ one is associated with attempts to interpret human thinking and behavior in machine terms. The first one is limited by the lack of semantic content, personal coloring and full-fledged psychosomatic embodiment of computational processes in AIA. Hypertrophy of logical normative components in them leads to mechanistic rigidity. The second is generated by the expansion of digital technologies into real life, their active fusion, which gives rise to the ideology of computationalism, according to which people are computing agents. At the same time, the convergence of the ‘intellectualization’ of AIA and the ‘machinization’ of human is a false appearance, since there are fundamental ontological and epistemological limits. The main ontological limit: human rationality is based on socio-cultural and bio-adaptive layers of the existence of a human subject, and therefore cannot be principally reproduced in ontologically simple, techno-physical AIA. The main epistemological limit: human thinking cannot be formalized and computationally objectified, since a meaningful semantic core is primary in it, which bears the stamp of subjectivity, and is also strongly linked to layers of implicit personal knowledge and other components of consciousness. Among them a number of sub- and non-rational phenomena stand out (emotions, values, common sense, morality), which are maximally distanced from algorithmic averaging, but without interaction with them rationality remains essentially reduced. It is concluded that the computational representation and objectification of definite components of rationality in AIA is possible, but is not rational itself, since their artificial separation from the larger, human-sized part of rationality initiates a split in it.

The subject of the study is the structuring of the spatiotemporal (chronotopological) relationship that characterizes human being. The article considers the totality of time and space (a chronotope) as a dynamic dialectical organization, immanent to all that existence (especially human), developing together with it and being an integral part and a way of its evolution. The theoretical and methodological basis of the work is the original concept of the chronotope of the Russian philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century (A.A. Ukhtomsky and M.M. Bakhtin), as well as the approaches to chronotopological research that have been developed to date in modern science, such as the Samara Philosophical and Cultural school, the Ekaterinburg Sociological and Philosophical school and the Saransk Philological and Cultural school. The study develops the model of basic structural elements of chronotope, which includes principles, modes and forms (levels), that are introduced to deepen and further develop the idea of the structuring of the chronotopology of the world and a human. The principles of the chronotopological structure are fundamental dialectical and logical schemes that define the basic foundations of its functioning and development, setting the general vector of its evolution. Chronotopological forms are steadily formed levels of the spatiotemporal structure that arise and function in the process of its formation and development. The modes of chronotopological organization are the ways of its functioning and progress that are specifically historically and individually determined for each person. The paper suggests the presence in the chronotopological organization of a secondary number of structural elements, which are in addition to the basic integral forms. There are infra, ultra and meta levels, which complement and complicate basic chronotopological forms. The infra level of the spatiotemporal structure consists of such temporal and topological phenomena as the material bodily bottom, alienated unsettled social space and alienated historical time. The ultra level is represented by the personal world and the microchronotope of consciousness, equipped with public and private space and existentially authentic time. The meta level of time and space is the final generalization of the evolutionary path of the chronotopological structure, from the life of a particular person to the historical path of culture, society and civilization.

The article is devoted to the traditional theme – self-determination of philosophy. The author reveals the specifics of philosophy in comparison with other areas of spiritual culture – religion, art and science. The single basis for comparison is their ability to overcome human suffering. The named areas differ in that very ability, each of them helps to overcome suffering in its own special way. For science, the main means of solving life’s problems is knowledge, for religion – faith, for art – imagination, and for philosophy – understanding.

Understanding in this article is considered as a movement towards clear knowledge, towards meaning, and at the same time as the result of such a movement as the achieved meaning. Knowledge clothed in certain, culturally given forms, seems understandable to us. We draw the basic models of understanding from our natural languages. Forms of judgments, cultural universals, and basic theories also give us forms of understanding. Among many forms of understanding, an important role is played by those forms and models that crystallize in the main philosophical categories, such as ‘essence’, ‘whole’, ‘general’, ‘cause’, ‘purpose’, etc.

The peculiarity of philosophical thinking is that understanding in it does not act as a means for further application, but as a direct action, practice. The achieved understanding in itself eliminates suffering and resolves life’s difficulties. In this sense, philosophy as a whole is not a theory, but a practical exercise aimed at making human life happier.

According to the author, the described four ways of overcoming suffering are ‘ideal types’ (M. Weber). On the one hand, science, religion, art and philosophy in their historical practices can be characterized by this or that degree of syncretism. On the other hand, there are cases when the ‘official rubric’ of a particular sphere of culture and its content do not coincide: for example, philosophy is practiced under the name ‘religion’, scientific research is carried out under the name ‘philosophy’, and art is created under the name ‘science’.

The article analyzes the ancient concept of ‘metanoia’ in the religious and philosophical tradition, carries out a historical and philosophical reconstruction of the term. The author considers the concept of ‘metanoia’ in the context of the problem of the relationship between mind and body. Tracing the transformation of the concept, coming from Aristotle, the author of the article shows that the Eastern religious tradition understands repentance as the integration of the divine mind, which exists separately, into the human body and the beginning of its existence according to new laws. Western scholasticism, following Aristotle, separates the active divine and passive human minds, but denies their union in the body, endowing repentance with a supra-individual meaning, interpreting it as a kind of turn towards the Divine light that occurs outside the physical body and is not the result of a genuine experience of union with Christ. The author considers understanding of the concept of ‘metanoia’ by such theologians as Gregory Palamas, Clement of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas. It is concluded that the problem of the bodily localization of the mind, the essence of the mind, is closely related to the problem of repentance and the historical transformation of the concept of ‘metanoia’.