Ideas and Ideals

The aim of the work is to identify the problems of the formation of engineer's culture in the system of higher education. Proceeding from the key role of social education in the development of culture, the authors analyze the state of contemporary Russian education, relying on the opinions of many academic educators. Basing on the conducted analysis, the authors draw a conclusion about the need for social and moral education of students, in particular, future engineers, in the process of their professional training. The authors substantiate the proposition that the basis of the professional ethics of an engineer is high culture of an individual, which must be formed at all levels of education. The concepts of the general culture of an individual and the professional culture of an engineer are correlated. The authors present the characteristic of the engineer's personality culture in the context of the new standard of education. It is indicated that the competence approach is fundamental in the formation of a technical college of engineering specialties graduate. The article also reveals the shortcomings of this approach; the main ones are the narrow specialization of a modern graduate of a higher education institution and one-sidedness of his education. It is pointed out that it is necessary to form such qualities of the future engineer as initiative and responsibility. The article analyzes the students opinions about the ethics of an engineer, the most part of students agree that the ethics of an engineer assumes responsibility to the society for the results of their activities. The article analyzes two main approaches to modern education. At the heart of the first is the formation of professional competencies, the basis of the second is the primacy in the formation of the person’s spiritual values. Moreover, the latter implies an organic integration of the competence approach and the traditional cognitive approach to the culture-centricity of vocational education, in the process of which spiritual, aesthetic, social, ecological and political development of the personality takes place. The basis of this approach should be a set of fundamental concepts of general and professional culture, based on national culture. Cultural-centric approach allows you to approach professional training in a comprehensive, systematic, holistic manner, which is a necessary condition for the formation of a future engineer's culture.

The article presents a sociophilosophical analysis of the problem of identity formation in contemporary society with its systemic transitional character. The idea of complex identity formation in sociospatial form is put forward and substantiated. Identity types, presented as a hierarchical structure in some conceptions, are positioned as components of sociospatial identity.  Due to highly dynamic social changes and processes the structure of sociospatial identity undergoes transformations, resulting in strengthening some components and loss of importance of the other ones. Factors, determining new identity types and transformations of the process of identification of the social actor are discussed. Major tendencies of its self-identification and their results are revealed. The most relevant of them are the following: identity fragmentation and, consequently, the breakdown of its hierarchy, transgressing the limits of national identity and formation of alternative identities (transnational, binational), strengthening of ethnic and cultural identities. Overall, the shift of identity formation from macro-social level and its dispersion to meso- and micro-social levels is established. The significance of the structure center loss is emphasized, indicating the state of chaos, which is analyzed from post-modernist viewpoint as a chance for plural identity formation in the contemporary society and, consequently, antinomic tendencies of the process.  The most relevant aspects of the presented issues, requiring further empirical investigation, are identified in the conclusion.

In the publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev traced two lines of knighthood’s idealization: the embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. In his book “New Religious Consciousness and Society” (1907) he added the third line, which is formed on the basis of the first two and it portrays the knight as an attractive example of overcoming a self-sufficing, depersonalized, godless state. The main theme of the book is the necessity to update Christianity and all parts of public life. Religious revival, according to Berdyaev, can be connected only with the development of a person. In the modern world the false hierarchy of values is dominating: subjective interests, relative willpower of a person forces out the higher unconditional values connected with the universal objective God’s will. The state serves as an expression of subjective human will, a product of the boundless enslaving power of one person over another. N.A. Berdyaev recognizes free theocracy as an ideal, the only morally justified form of the state. He sees an alternative to the modern false theocracy in the system of values of medieval culture - anarchical principles of feudalism and the personal knightly honor. The Russian philosopher correlates the knightly ideal of the Middle Ages with the modern epoch and convinces a reader of the necessity of its actualization. New forms of organization of public life assume a knightly war for the liberation of a person, including the liberation from violence of the state. Speaking about the mutual relationship between the individual and the state, Berdyaev joins the internal polemic with Slavophiles. He formulated his position on this question earlier, in the articles of 1903-1904. Berdyaev rejects the Slavophile idyll of the former Russia. Greatness and individuality of the nation presupposes freedom of a human being, the national spirit manifests itself not in the solution of the state problems, but in creative realization of universal tasks, common to the whole mankind.

The author considers the formation and development of the “public sphere”, the construction of its theoretical image, prospects and threats in the epoch of IT prevalence. The author analyzes different concepts of “public sphere” and reveals its substantial similarities and differences. He also gives a thorough analysis of the most popular approaches (terms, ideas, concepts) to the definition of "public sphere" in scientific literature. The author comes to the conclusion, that the result of the long-run discussion is the understanding of the fact, that the rational and fair space for discussions, which was mentioned by J. Habernas, needs the new forms of its implementation. It is quite possible and logical to put it into action in the Internet. At the same time, the problem of threats and the limits of the virtual public sphere are still unsolved. Therefore, the society needs support and coordination of people in the interaction with the new embodiment of “the public sphere”. The concept of "public sphere" is used rather often, but being highly controversial it gives rise to the need for careful consideration of its content for systematizing ideas and concepts that relate to it and predict further ways of its development or transformation to the virtual public sphere in the space of the Internet.

 The work provides insight into the formation and development of the “public opinion” concept in the latter half of 18^th century. A comparative analysis of the articles ‘opinion’ and ‘public opinion’ in the “Encyclopedia” of Diderot & d'Alembert and in the “Encyclopédie Méthodique” provides an opportunity to trace evolution and the distance between the perceptions of two notions during the various periods of time. The article considers ‘opinion’ as “doubtful and uncertain judgment” and ‘opinions’ as points of view of judges underlying the judgement, which the French Encyclopaedists referred to legal and logical spheres, and their impact on the formation of the “public opinion” concept. The work provides an analysis of ideas of public opinion as a mechanism of public control of social and political realm, which peculiarity is independence from the sphere of state regulation and the lack of institutionalized means of influencing the institutions.

The central idea of this article is that the problem of representation of cyborg experience for us, non-modified humans, becomes solvable by the composition of two semiotic approaches: biosemiotics and actant semiotics. First, since "cyborg" implies cybernetic organism, we may consider technomodified humans to the сertain extent equivalent with animals. Therefore we can use the method of Umwelt-analysis: it was created by J.von Uexkull to reconstruct how the world is given to a living organism with particular bodily structure in "action-perception" functional circles. Within Umwelt-analysis, biosemiotics exposes the way in which perceived world appears to an organism as consisting of "material signs" where an organism itself is a sort of "communicative structure". The very possibility to describe Umwelt obtains because an environment and an organism stand in sign-relations with each other (which is also true for cyborgs). On the next step, we use tools of actant semiotics from works of B. Latour to clarify how Umwelt-descriptions produce immersive effects upon us, representing the experience of an organism. Latour claims that, once the flow of transformations from material actants to textual ones is done, the realism of scientific texts comes from a composition of characters, or, in semiotician terms, "inner frame of reference". Revealing of semiotic operations (shifting out, shifting in and figuration) in Umwelt-descriptions then displays how viewpoint of an organism on the world appears inside world-text and takes readers attention. We test proposed the approach on the example of people with magnetic implants, concluding with further perspectives of its application.

The article investigates the characteristics of socio-cultural manifestations of theoretical knowledge about socialization. The author identifies these manifestations with the theoretical images, which have three attributes. First, theoretical images are the results of (re-)construction of theoretical discourse which appropriately represents the main traits of reality. Second, the mentioned images correspond with the types of scientific and philosophic rationality, i. e. classical, non-classical, post-nonclassical rationality. Third, theoretical images rely on different versions of normative, interpretative or normative-interpretative methodological perspectives. The author argues that the listed attributes should be given a high priority while studying knowledge about socialization as phenomena of socio-cultural reality.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called "people of culture" in two areas of Eurasia - Europe and East Asia. They appear as a product of cultural exchange between the "South" (the Mediterranean, China proper) and the "North", inhabited by people of a different mentality and economy. We are talking about a different perception of the so-called ancient culture, that is, the configuration of culture that developed in antiquity and became paradigmatic for the whole metaregion ("Christian World", East Asian Civilization Zone). As examples of such people are taken the largest figures of medieval culture I. S. Eriugena, who left a deep trace in scholasticism, and a member of the imperial clan Yēlǜ in the nomadic Chitan Empire Liao (907-1125) Tuǜ. People with unconventional looks on culture and complex destiny, they demonstrated a peculiar attitude to southern culture not as a form and means of education, but as a complex of ideas and recipes for building a new political and cultural reality.

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.

The current article says that transference and entrenchment of information in the space and time is possible due to the appearance of a written language. A text is characterized by the function of memory, because it is not only a generator of new meanings, but it is also a guide of cultural memory. A written language can store and accumulate reminiscences about preceding contexts. Speaking about reminiscences of a text we should note that a text becomes meaningful. Such meaningful text enters into relations with cultural tradition (or cultural remembrance), which is born in mind of addressees. Texts which store cultural activity include the ability to condense the information, formulated differently; the ability of storing historical and cultural remembrances appear in such texts. Hence texts, which are transferred from one generation to another through centuries, don’t lose the information.  This paper is devoted to the principles of replication of cultural information. In culture this task is performed by units of cultural information – memes. Mutations of memes are presented as transformation formulae. The current article deals with aspects of preserving non-genetic data. The subject of analysis is formulae and clichés of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Bible. The development of linguistic formulae is under scrutiny. The main types of transformation of formulae and clichés are defined. Different variants of formulae are given; they are registered on the basis of the Bible. The author describes four main types of transformations of formulae phrases, which demonstrate development of relations in the culture. These four main types are: type “A” which is reframing of conventional formulae; type “Б” which is lexical substitution of a key-term; type “B” which is production of new combinations and forms with new semantic structure, type “Г” is a description with substitution of a lexeme in the context of a formula, which denotes different events. The author demonstrates that formulae deal with innovative descriptions which are characterized with more detalization. Consequently, growth of information is described.