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Научные контексты «звездного ужаса»: Комментарий к Андрею Белому
Fear of stars was frequently expressed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It was rooted both in apocalyptic fears and in the rejection of modern cosmology current at that time. Besides, morbid fears, of great interest to the contemporary psychiatry, included the so-called “astraphobia”, fear of lightning, gradually re-interpreted as fear of stars, which contributed to the attention to the topic. All of these contexts have to be taken into account when commenting on Andrej Belyj’s “Sphynx” (1905) and “Second Symphony (Dramatical)” (1902).
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason aims to determine boundaries of reason. Reason is a
faculty of the soul. But Kant does not deal explicitly with the question what a faculty of the soul itself may be. The dissertation construes Kant’s implicit notion of a mental faculty in relation to psychological debates in 17th and 18th century Germany. It can be shown that Kant agreed with Christian August Crusius in that faculties are real properties, an assumption that was denied by Christian Wolff. This poses a problem which is fundamental for understanding Kant’s project: How can we have knowledge of mental faculties at all? If knowledge of faculties was empirical for Kant, it would belong to psychology rather than to epistemology which, according to Kant, must not rely on empirical facts. In order to find out whether there can be knowledge a priori about mental faculties, the book provides a close reading of relevant passages from published texts and other sources (lecture transcripts, Reflexionen). The final result is negative: Kant has no conclusive argument for the real existence of mental faculties. Nevertheless, an awareness of Kant’s unwritten “metaphysics of the mental” is essential for understanding implicit premisses of Kant’s thought.
This is my short reply to Adonis Frangeskou’s response to my review of his book (2017). I offer a careful reading of the passage from Levinas quoted in Frangeskou’s response. I discuss the idea of God-in-me in connection with the issues of sensibility, vulnerability, and suffering. I argue that interpreting Levinas within the framework of the analytics of the sublime is crucially important for the catastrophic dimension of Levinas’ approach to subjectivity.
In Kant’s Critical corpus, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone occupies a special – and not uncontroversial – place. Picking up on his concerns with God, religion and morality already present in nuce in the final sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant outlines in this work an "enlightened" religious standpoint that does not go beyond the rational, but instead remains strictly within "the limits of reason alone". At stake here is not just the general possibility of such a standpoint within the Critical framework, but also the more specific (but no less important) questions about the structure and function of reason’s limits, about what it means to stay within them in the transition from knowledge to morality to religion, and finally, about how religion itself gets transformed if thematized from within these limits. Without pretending to exhaust these issues, in this paper I follow one important conceptual thread that runs from Kant’s accounts of immanence and ideality in the Critique of Pure Reason to the religious standpoint in the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and ties the aforementioned issues together. I argue that it is Kant’s concept of immanence that allows him to present morality and then religion as immanent "expansions" of reason’s autonomous plane, and to provide a novel (immanent) re-configuration of the traditional (transcendent) Christian religious standpoint. Furthermore, on Kant’s account, this rational religious standpoint both follows from and remains irreducible to secular morality. In this, I suggest in conclusion, Kant offers a logic or grammar of immanence that goes beyond the rigid religious-secular binary, which makes his account of an »enlightened« religion, as it were, "post-Enlightenment" in character.
A neat split-up of methods into qualitative and quantitative ‘boxes’ works with just a bunch of elementary and time-tested research devices. It would not easily apply such a division to multiplying cases of new designs for productive investigations. Often they are compound research capacities. A new and trendy ‘box’ termed mixed methods is ready at hand. However, compound structures are not just amalgamations. Their effectiveness rests on structural propensities and not on amassing of their initial components. Furthermore, steadily multiplying new research principles rest on neither quantity nor quality but on something transcending the quality – quantity dichotomy, e.g. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) or Lijphartian analysis of patterns of democratic rule. Methodological domains can diverge or converge. They can dispose of all ‘deceitful’ aberrations and shrink to a single ‘authentic’ set of algorithms (methodological monism or in its radical display methodological rigorism). They can also entangle alternative research capacities (methodological liberalism or pluralism). The authors would explicate their methodological stance as ‘democratic’. This is more than just a pompous political analogy. Modern democracy converges all sorts of rule to make them good enough for accountable and inclusive governance. Likewise, advanced methods of our age merge any kinds of exploratory faculties to make them good enough for valid and comprehensive investigation. Just as modern democratic practices and conventions have been emerging only recently, current multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods still evolve as trial aptitudes for making research far-reaching and reliable enough. Both modern democracy and transdisciplinary are more of a promise rather than long established paragons. The authors perceive the entire methodological realm as shaped into three overlapping but still very distinct major methodological domains – mathematical, morphological and semiotic organons of learning and research. They coalesce around fundamental and abiding principles. Their mundane and transient apparitions are grand methodological approaches and paradigms not say nothing about claims and technical devices of specific schools of thought and research. Mathematical organon integrates a relatively comprehensive domain. Morphological and semiotic ones only crudely amalgamate assortments of areas, branches and endeavors of research that are still at variance with each other. The task is to overcome residual discrepancies and to advance integrating principles of general or ‘pure’ semiotics (Morris) and morphology. The principles of organons derive from our basic sensoria and other primary cognitive abilities. Some originate in our sense of order, measure and quantity to produce mathematical organon. Others commence with our perception of forms, shapes and configurations to yield a would-be morphological organon. Further ones amplify our faculty to re-create and discover meanings in our intercourse with the world and each other to commence a budding semiotic organon. Immanuel Kant, Charles Sanders Pierce and other great minds provide guidelines for trichotomous structure of organons. It is tempting to proclaim analogy between the trichotomous structure of organons and current vague distinction of quantitative, qualitative and ‘mixed’ clusters of methods. One has to explore the analogy. Correlations between configurational comparative studies and morphology or between qualitative studies and semiotics are still problematic. Furthermore, it would be premature to expect a quick integration of entire domains of morphology or semiotics. It is pragmatic to work for integration of selected focal core areas. Possible options are reshaping of neo-institutional paradigms into morphological ones, integration of biological and linguistic morphologies as well as further advancement of biosemiotics and biopolitics.
Today, computer simulations are used in numerous research practices of experimentation, prediction and the construction of theories. For a short historical period, the use of computer simulations influenced the philosophy and methodology of a scientific experiment, which, however, is only now beginning to be realized by philosophers and is considered by them as the source or factor of the emergence of a new epistemological pattern of experimentation through the adoption of ontological independence of computer simulations. Despite the ongoing, in the author's opinion, transformations in the philosophy of the experiment, stimulated by practitioners of computer simulations, a consensus on their basic characteristics has not yet been found. There is a lack of clear technical boundaries in the understanding and definition of computer simulations of scientific experiments. Discussions about the primary epistemological significance of one of the four experiment's types (field, laboratory, computer simulation, mathematical modeling) on the criterion of their relationship with the material substrate of the target system the experiment (materiality argument) do not abate. Despite the significant contribution of computer simulations to the practice of modern scientific research and experimentation, discussions continue about the presence or absence of their philosophical significance, including their value as a source of new knowledge. The author of the report will try to identify the main directions in the development of the concept computer simulations of scientific experiments in order to establish the causes of contemporary philosophical discussions and ambiguous view problems, as well as determine the degree of significance the transcendental foundations in computer simulations that can transform the modern philosophy of science. For this, the author chooses an original classification of approaches to the formulation the concept under study, which is a dichotomy formed in the course of a controversy between two groups of philosophers, so classified due to directly opposite views on computer simulations, in terms of their value to philosophy.
The majority of Kant scholars has taken it for granted that for Kant the soul is in some sense present in space and that this assumption is by and large unproblematic. If we read Kant’s texts in the context of debates on this topic within 18th century rationalism and beyond, a more complex picture emerges, leading to the somewhat surprising conclusion that Kant in 1770 can best be characterised as a Cartesian about the mind. The paper first develops a framework for describing the various positions on the place of the soul in space as varieties of ‘localism’, since German philosophers of the 18th century all agreed on the fact that the soul is in some sense present in space. Strong localists (Crusius, Knutzen) maintain that the soul occupies a place that cannot at the same time be occupied by a material substance. The Königsberg Wolffian Christian Gabriel Fischer is an ‘epistemic localist’ defending the view that our knowledge about the presence of the soul in space is limited. Bilfinger holds that the soul only represents itself as being present in space, he is a ‘representational localist’. The Cartesians, including Leonhard Euler and his teacher Samuel Werenfels, assume that the soul is effective in a region of space without truly being present there. They are ‘virtual localists’. Kant’s attitude towards this problem before the 1760s is a bit unclear. But his writings in this period are at least compatible with the strong localism defended by Knutzen. In the Herder transcripts (1762-1764) and other texts after 1760, Kant begins to distance himself from this view, but he does not articulate clearly his own position. This trend culminates in Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), where Kant oscillates somewhat uneasily between epistemic and virtual localism and criticises explicitly the Cartesian thesis that the soul’s presence in the body is limited to a determinate region. The dissertation from 1770 marks another radical change in Kant’s views on the place of the soul. Here, he subscribes to virtual localism and its concomitant thesis that the soul itself is, properly speaking, nowhere. Together with the thesis that the soul knows that it belongs to the mundus intelligibilis this makes Kant in 1770 a Cartesian about the mind.
This encyclopedia entry analyses the notion of a faculty with a special emphasis on the conceptual history of faculties of the soul between Aristotle and Ryle.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.