Ideas and Ideals

In the article the author suggests a new approach to the problem of anomie, which manifests itself in the form of deviant behavior. In his opinion inconsistence is a prerequisite for social anomie. The main social viability criterion of an individual is the official recognition of the value and necessity of his/her activities and functions which the person performs within social institutions. The main criterion of the social inability of an individual is non-recognition of activities and functions resulting from the imbalance between the consumed and produced products of his/her activities (labor) with the disbalance in favor of the consumed. It does not matter whether the individual produces more goods required from him/her or less. The very presence of the disbalance in the amount of the products of labor generates anomie. As the result of this imbalance the individual is first gradually alienated from the labor process by the society and then from people as the subjects of social life because of that disproportion in the produced and consumed goods, which doesn’t meet socially accepted norms. The alienation of the individual causes inadequate forms of adaptive reactions in the form of deviant behavior, with the aim of social adaptation, which guarantees safety. The author singles out an individual as the subject of anomie, who is a source of deviant behavior and social institutions in which the individual is not able to socialize. Planning his further work the author outlines the plan of his investigations: to define the socio-historical stages of social institutions development, as well as to determine the involvement of individuals in the activities of those institutions.

The philosophy of N. Berdyaev is a restless movement of thought in the space with three conceptual coordinates. The person, creativity, freedom in their unity constitute the universe of Spirit, define the dynamics, the existential orientation of genuine philosophical thinking. The philosophical thought creatively confirms the being of a free person by means of the ideal man’s image formation: the ideal man is opposed to the evil kingdom of necessity, oversteps the limits and overcomes the empirical world. According to Berdyaev, the ethical quintessence of the European culture is three images of the ideal man – the sage, the saint and the knight. This article traces the sources of the knight ideal’s interpretation in the texts of the Russian thinker. The romantic idea of knighthood as “an eternal task of human spirit” demanded overcoming of early Slavophiles’ conceptualizations of knighthood, but Berdyaev valued these authors very highly for their aspiration to holistic understanding of Spirit’s life, to the harmony between the internal and the external. In his publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev outlines two lines of knighthood’s idealization as an embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. The first line is connected with the discussion about “new religious consciousness”, D.S. Merezhkovsky's idea about metaphysical primordiality and a religious equivalence of "spirit" and "flesh". The second line is determined by Berdyaev’s treatment of K.N. Leontyev's heritage where the historical knighthood represents itself as an alternative of the bourgeois commonness and mediocrity, vulgarity and philistinism.

Within the concept of post-industrial society the accumulation of human capital is considered to be a major factor of accelerated economic development. Since the advent of the theory of "human capital" has been more than half a century. On the subject of many papers published. However, researchers still do not have a single point of view on the economic content of the concept of "human capital". Appeal to the essence of the category of "capital" leads to the conclusion about the illegality of the use of the term in the strict scientific terminology "human capital". The article reviews the definitions, that researchers offer to disclose the content of the concept. Analysis of the content presented definitions leads to the conclusion that in this case, refers to the human potential and the degree of its development. Within the framework of the theory of "human capital" great attention is paid to the measurement of its cost. However, the value of human potential is difficult to keep exclusively to the valuation, since the possibilities of direct measuring method does not exist in principle. In connection with this conclusion about the need for further research to develop methods to a greater extent based on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis of human potential.

This article is devoted to the problem statement for the interdisciplinary research of “the will" concept. As the main methodological principle of research, the author uses the archaeological method of Michel Foucault, whose method was used by Giorgio Agamben in the study of “the will" concept. The main part of the article gives an integrated cultural-historical psychological analysis of “the will" concept in Russian philosophy and psychology. The author comes to the conclusion that “the will" concept exists only in the Russian-language philosophy or in translations of European philosophical studies into the Russian language. Thereby this fact indicates that the translations created the concept confusion: “the wish” was interpreted as “the will”. Basing on the works of modern psychologists (E.P. Ilyin, V.A. Ivannikov), the author comes to the conclusion that the philosophical understanding of the will in the XX century was forgotten, and the psychological understanding is deficient. The author pays special attention to the theory of the will suggested by the Russian psychologist K.D. Kavelin, whose work was not noticed during his lifetime and it is forgotten by modern psychology. In conclusion, the author proposes to direct the philosophical efforts to create the foundations for defining “the will" concept, giving the opportunity for applied psychological work with this concept.

In the article the words “mir”, “volya”, “svet”, “pravda”. On the material of the Ancient Russian literature it is shown that each of these words has at least two substantially distinct meanings, and two (or three) meanings influence each other, creating game of senses inexpressible in other languages. At the same time, these words define the semantic core of national self-identification in modern times, forming the certain attitude to the key principles of life. In XIX-th century in Russian poetry “volya” is opposed to the Western “svoboda” (liberty) as the Christian goal to specific political position. The ambivalence of the national consciousness is presented by the fact that the ideal peaceful beauty of the mundane cooperative communal life coexisted with a free desire to get beyond the world-community and earthly world. Yet both ideals were receiving internal justification, intersecting with Pravda-truth as well as with pravda-justice.

The round table discussed how philosophy interprets the concept of will and whether it is possible, basing on this understanding, to create a methodology for a psychological understanding of the will. It is stated that so far in the domestic tradition there is no methodology that would overcome the crisis associated with the inability to develop this concept. The category of will is considered in the key of the historical and philosophical traditions; it plays an important role both in ancient and medieval philosophy, and in the philosophy of modern times. Special attention was paid to the Schopenhauer approach, who believed that everything is an objectification of the will. The will was also discussed in its relation to such a category as the soul, and in this case the will becomes a part of the soul; and the concept of the will was also considered in its relation to the notion of power: in this case the will is the awareness of desire and aspiration for its realization.

The paper presents the evolution of pragmatism, with an emphasis on its third stage which is called neo-pragmatism. The paper considers the specific features of this stage in the light of the philosophy of Joseph Margolis. The paper demonstrates that Margolis takes part in all relevant discussions of this philosophical movement, first of all, about the relationship of realism and relativism and about the nature of the truth. The question about the nature of the truth related to the problem of incommensurability and alethic relativism, and Margolis offers his own version of this kind of relativism – the robust relativism. The article discusses these issues in general. A more detailed analysis the authors provide for the Margolis’s solution of the problem of the realism and relativism compatibility. On the one hand, Margolis firmly stays on relativistic positions. On the other hand, he argues that it is possible to defend realism against relativistic attacks but only if to reconcile these two trends. Margolis offers two strategies for doing this. He implements the first strategy through the clarification of the nature of skepticism. He formulates the form of realism which could resist to skepticism, it ought to satisfy the main statements of neopragmatism. Such a kind of realism Margolis calls minimal realism. The second strategy appeals to practices and activities and it is implemented through the actual survival and viability of the human species that is closely related to the historicity of human existence. For the last strategy Margolis offers two ways as well, the pragmatic and epistemic ones. The epistemic way allows to legitimize realism through an appeal to the technology, the existence and the use of which indicates human cognitive competence about external world. The pragmatic way legitimizes realism through the successful interventions of collective human knowledge in different structures of the world. Summarizing the authors draw a conclusion, that Margolis tries to occupy a middle position between two poles – absolutism (foundationalism) and relativism, which are presented most clearly in the pragmatists dispute between Putnam and Rorty, and thereby he tries to eliminate the differences between these two tendencies in contemporary philosophy.

The article is devoted to the anniversary of the birth (370 years ago) and the date of death (300 years ago) of the outstanding German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, jurist, historian, linguist, and diplomat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz undertake a creative synthesis of science, philosophy and theology, producing a unique philosophical system. The foundation of this system is constituted by the doctrine of preestablished harmony. In all areas in which he worked, Leibniz made great discoveries. It inherited the gift of synthesizing the disparate views of different thinkers on the basis of the original methodological principle based on the universality and rigor of philosophical arguments in their logical sequence. Leibnitz is also a great theologian and originator of the profound ethical system. Ethical optimism of Leibniz's teleology has Christian religious worldview as its basis.

In this paper the author tries to look at Leibniz from the topos of Indian philosophy. François Jullien called such a strategy “dépayser la pensée” – to withdraw a thought from its habitat and to see it through the lens of different culture. She refers to Indian philosophy, especially to some Buddhists systems, and highlights – in a more general intercultural perspective – continualistic and atomistic approaches in Leibniz’s thought. The author argues that despite Leibniz’ consistent criticism, predominantly from the continualistic position, of the ancient and the contemporary atomism, Leibniz in his own metaphysics remained a convinced atomist - his monads are the only final causes of things, substances, or "true atoms of nature". In this paper, Leibniz’ mereological arguments are examined with the help of some principles and conceptualizations developed in Indian philosophy. In particular, the author compares the whole-parts models in monadology and in Nyāya, as well as the Buddhist schools of Abhidharma and Yogācāra. The article also shows that because of their atomistic approach both Leibniz and Buddhists confronted a problem of how to give an account for a complex substance, and proposed different strategies of dealing with its continuity. If we evaluate the position of Leibniz, for example, from a Buddhist point of view, its main drawback consists in theism, in an attempt to shift responsibility for the universe from human beings to God, and instead of investigating causal relations between things to recourse to the theistic principle of pre-established harmony.

The article deals with the mathematization of thinking program proposed by Leibnitz, and the program of Mathematics foundations by Hilbert. The author argues that modern symbolic and mathematical logics were created on the basis of these programs. The article examines which aspects and meanings of thinking and reasoning had to be sacrificed, why modern symbolic logics are continuously reproducing, and what is the relationship of symbolic logics to the traditional Aristotelian one. Defending the pointed out statements, the author refers to the works of Aristotle and Schopenhauer, Ya. Lukasevich, A. Vasilyev, A. Karpenko, A. Anisov, S. Pavlov. The article states that the formation of symbolic logic required philosophical reflection of the conditions of conceivable solutions of symbolic logic creators and the need to distinguish between the two types of historical logics, to resolve the contradictions between the sense of autonomy of symbolic logic and the sense of its dependence on the traditional logic. According to the author’s opinion, Ludwig Wittgenstein, then Lukasevich, and the other Russian philosophers tried to respond to the mentioned above challenges in their works.