Issue 4 2021

This paper presents the key theses summarizing the main points of the articles written for the thematic issue «The Future of History of Philosophy». The authors of the articles are representatives of the Ural School of History of Philosophy — V.B. Kulikov, A.V. Pertsev, and E.S. Cherepanova, who were students of K.N. Lyubutin, and also the well-known expert on Plato’s works from St. Petersburg R.V. Svetlov. Each of these authors finds their own way to pose the question of the future of the history of philosophy in the context of unprecedented dynamism of sociocultural systems. For example, R.V. Svetlov explores the situation of ʽrediscoveringʼ of the history of philosophy within the framework of analytic philosophy, which has become a philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the history of philosophy itself could not remain unchanged under such impacts. Critical rethinking of established ideas is commonplace of contemporary research in the area of history of philosophy. R.V. Svetlov challenges the well-established view that Platonism is based on the idea of the dominance of reason in human nature. On the contrary, Plato’s conception appears to be an account of the fundamental incompleteness and uncertainty of man’s position in being. A.V. Pertsev demonstrates the value of attempts to reconstruct the holistic world of famous philosophers on the basis of the whole set of documents recording the circumstances of their life using the example of Friedrich Nietzsche. Such research is an effective means of restoring the integral human in our atomized contemporaries. E.S. Cherepanova explores the philosophical aspects of the work of Austrian writer G. Broch. She shows the inhumanity and anti-intellectualism of the positivist alternative to bourgeois society. The ʽbusinesslikeʼ nature of its individuals saves them neither from economic upheaval nor from the horrors of another world war. V.B. Kulikov points to the potential of dialogical perception of Buber’s philosophical anthropology in periods of human ʽhomelessnessʼ, when a person realizes the homelessness of this world and becomes problematic, becomes a question for himself. The question each of us has to answer.

Today history of philosophy is undergoing critical rethinking. For the first generations of analytic philosophers, a true «historiophobia» was generally characteristic. However, as it often happens, the critical attitude did not abolish the interest to the thinkers of the past and did not lead to the denial of the significance of the history of philosophy as one of the forms of philosophical work. Moreover, it gave rise to new methodological approaches, which are now being actively assimilated by historians of thought. An increasing number of works have titles that include the words «Revisited» or «Rethinking». There arises an opportunity to abandon the power of classical assessments and classical hierarchies of the significant in the texts of thinkers of the past (which were formulated by authors of the 19th–20th centuries). This paper deals with Plato’s ideas about man as an example. Familiarization with a wider range of Plato’s texts destroys the traditional concept of the dominance of reason in the composition of the human being. Plato describes the human soul in such a way that it is not clear where its periphery is and where its center is. The significance of reason is unconditional, it confirms the eternity of the spiritual nature, but its use by us in earthly life is quite ambivalent. And, most importantly, participation in philosophical work is not a guarantee that we, as people-puppets from the Laws, have already «pulled out» and «overcome» ourselves, having grasped the «golden thread». Plato’s doctrine of man is not a hymn to the human mind, but a story about the fundamental incompleteness and certainly in being as fundamental features of human existence.

The author believes that the current socio-cultural situation caused by the pandemic opens up the potential for intensified research in the field of history of philosophy. However, it is important to orient this research toward reconstruction of the integral world of a particular thinker based on the entire set of documents that record the circumstances of his life. The paper demonstrates this approach as applied to the Friedrich Nietzsche: his reflections and the process of work in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, music, and medicine are demonstrated in the context of the circumstances of his personal life and relations with his relatives. In parallel, the hermeneutic components of the modern biographical approach are clarified. The content of the psychological concept of «introvert» is compared with its philosophical and theological meaning. The author considers the interpretation of an introvert as a subject closed in itself and not useful for the society to be wrong. Based on texts written by Nietzsche, the author substantiates that the psychological type of an introvert implies a «super-social altruist» who splits his/her Self and places these elements into all things and all creatures of his/her inner world. At the same time, the «split Self» remains whole, maintaining the connection of everything to everything in the «inner world» and is therefore responsible for it. Thus, the worldview of an introvert (for example, a playwright, theologian, philosopher) is somewhat of a «meaning-making play» which he/she presents to the world so that the world could live according to it.

The article focuses on the philosophical aspect of the third part of the novel The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1930–1932) by Austrian writer Hermann Broch (1886–1951). Broch’s views were shaped by Austrian literary impressionism; in his youth, Broch was also much influenced by Otto Weininger, admired Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud. In Broch’s later works, researchers discover the legacies of Plato and Leibniz and claim that these philosophical schools were typical reference points for the Austrian thought. Analysis of literary works can help gain a better understanding of Austrian philosophy of the inter-war period. Not only do Broch’s novels mirror the versatile spiritual life of that period but they also show the development of a whole range of philosophical ideas and concepts. The style and language of The Sleepwalkers reflect the experimentation with new modes of expression in art as well as the author’s own attempts to create a new language and way of philosophizing in contrast to positivism. In the third part of the novel, Broch shows how difficult is the existence of a person who has lost their faith and the ability to comprehend complex metaphysical matters. The article outlines Broch’s vision of the new tasks that literature is facing in the conditions of the moral crisis he describes. Broch was mostly interested in axiological issues, around which he builds his novel. He also includes in his text extended philosophical interludes about the role of religion in the development of value orientations of his contemporaries. A special emphasis in the article is made on the concept of Sachlichkeit — practicality, which is also discussed by Karl Jaspers in his book The Spiritual Condition of the Age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 1932).

The philosophy of Martin Buber, a prominent representative of existentialism, is an anthropological project of understanding the crisis experience of man and society in the 20th century. The evolution of the dialogic idea in the direction of philosophical anthropology is caused by a new vision of historical perception of the problem of man. Moreover, social and personality-oriented motives were decisive in this process. The path of the problem, from Kant to the present, corresponded to what might be called a situation of reassessment of traditional European values. Buber searches for new spiritual foundations and worldview reference points. He researches the history of human thought and distinguishes between periods of «settledness», when man exists in a stable world, and periods of «homelessness», when man becomes aware of the homelessness of this world and there takes place his problematization, he becomes a problem for himself. The anthropological perspective is either embedded in cosmological, theological or logological constructions and loses its uniqueness, or acquires a real problematic nature and depth beyond all concepts and schemes. The dialogic perception of philosophical anthropology is organically complemented and supported by poetic practices of deep spiritual stories (Hasidism). The author suggests that, due to its complexity, contemporary social reality opens up new possibilities and clarifies the need for dialogue. Thus, study of M. Buber’s works by historians of philosophy is essential for an adequate understanding of the present and future of man and humanity.

There are two opposing approaches in the ontology of mathematics — realistic (mathematics does not depend on the human being) and constructivist (mathematical objects are created by mathematicians) ones. P. Benacerraf objected to the realistic approach by stating that mathematics is non-causal in nature and, accordingly, it is impossible to reach it from the physical world. The objection to constructivism is based solely on the idea of the effectiveness of mathematics in applied sciences. In the 20th century, the constructivist approach was prevailing. By the end of the century, this prevalence coincided with the general tendency: a skeptical attitude towards scientific knowledge in the philosophy of science. However, at the same time, science began to play a huge role in life. This inevitably led to the emergence of realistic ontologies. The philosophy of mathematics by Q. Meillassoux, M. Tegmark, R. Penrose represents a modern kind of realism. The paper deals with Meillassoux’s theory and arrives at a conclusion about its closeness to Pythagoreanism. Mathematical knowledge gives an opportunity to get out of the circle of correlationism, provided that mathematics is understood purely formally, not intuitively. The paper shows that logic and physics cannot be contingent if mathematics is reliable. The coincidence of mathematical structures with physical ones was previously called the «pre-established harmony between mathematics and physics». Now this is explained by the fact that the universe is organized according to mathematical laws. Thus, a new Pythagoreanism appears. It differs from Platonism in that in Platonism, mathematics is an autonomous world, while in Pythagoreanism it is built into the physical world and determines its laws. The article shows the need to apply the Aristotelian ontology of matter and form. Mathematics is a form, while physical embodiment requires matter. The flow of time in the physical world is associated with matter, as well as the presence of causality in it. The author comes to a conclusion that acceptance of the idea that the universe is arranged according to mathematical laws leads to the idea of the identity of being and thought.

The article presents the historical prerequisites for the creation of mathematical phenomenology. Within the framework of the infinite numbers problems, the ways of their phenomenological interpretation are discussed. Using the example of cooperation between Cantor and Husserl, the idea of mathematical phenomenology is formulated, which takes into account the correlation of mathematical objects with our consciousness. In formal logic, subjective factors often affect the judgment process. The phenomenological method is valuable in that it makes it possible to conduct both objectively and subjectively oriented research in mathematics and formal logic. In such a correlative study, subjective acts and objective referents of any phenomenon should be taken into account. The main goal of correlative research is to create conditions for overcoming relativistic tendencies in mathematics and formal logic. As a result of the analysis, the question of the relationship between descriptive phenomenology and formalized constructions is raised. In the historical and philosophical context, the answer to this question is based on the theoretical developments provided in Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic. Subjective-oriented logic goes back to the latent structures of theoretical reason. Here the problems of consciousness are formulated and solved in its live, actual execution with the help of egological research. In conclusion, historical examples of the subjective transformation of formal logic are provided. In the first example, an interpretation of Descartes’ conclusion cogito, ergo sum is given, showing that the existential inconsistency of «I do not exist» and the reliability of the initial position «I exist» were realized here. Another example of the transformation of logic is Husserl’s phenomenology. In order to bring logical forms to their subjective obviousness, it is necessary to change the orientation of consciousness and to consider objects as givens of consciousness.

The article represents a comparative study of the positions of the ancient Stoics and medieval samurai on the question «how to be?» in the conditions of blurred landmarks. Such conditions may arise within diverse socio-cultural contexts and seem to be the features of the contemporary globalization. The experience of comprehending the issue of human self-realization at the turning points of history undoubtedly took place not only in the Western European tradition of the 1st-2nd centuries and in the East Asian tradition of the 16th-17th centuries. Nevertheless, the unite grounds of human being found in these seemingly disparate cultural and historical localities are again relevant today. The purpose of the article is to analyze the conditions of the conceptualization of these ideas by the Roman Stoics and Japanese samurai, and to demonstrate the similarities and differences in their interpretation of fate, freedom, death, struggle, reality, and time. Methodologically, the research is based on the material of the historical-philosophical and existential-hermeneutic analysis of the treatises of Lucius Annei Seneca, Marcus Aurelius Antonin, Yuzan Daidodzi, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, and Miyamoto Musashi. The main conceptual result may be given in the following idea. Under the conditions of pluralism and groundlessness, a disoriented person seeks for support in him-/herself and realizes the «courage to be» through the ultimate determination to accept reality in its entirety and paradoxicality, including death, unpredictability of fate, and uncertainty of the further development path. The practice of «inner struggle» and non-choice between opposite positions and values appears to provide an escape to the golden mean of «the own», which allows self-realization to the maximum extent possible and gaining of a reliable ground in one’s own way of being for genuine participation in the «fluid» reality by a free act. The study is novel not only in that it is the first to reveal similarity of the existential grounds of stoicism and bushido, but also in that it pays attention to the turning periods in history during which, regardless of cultural affiliation, similar life-meaning questions arise. The answers found appear to be essential for a contemporary person, who finds themselves in the same situation of groundlessness, pluralism, and ambiguity of the transformations taking place around.

The paper deals with spatiotemporal characteristics of power in the philosophical theory of A. Kozhev. It is argued that that Kozhev’s philosophy of power was based on the philosophy of power of G. Hegel. However, the spatiotemporal characteristics of Hegel’s power and Kozhev’s power are essentially different. Hegel’s power is totally topochronous, it absorbs temporality, leaving only formal chronology, whereas Kozhev’s power corresponds to the concept of «Chronotope». Developing the ideas of Hegel, A. Kozhev offers a philosophical theory of power in which time and space harmoniously merge in the format of co-existence. Kozhev refuses to speak of the historicity of power, devoting all his efforts to the study of the internal temporality of power and its manifestation at the phenomenal level. As such, he suggests seeing separate modes (in our terminology, chronotopes) of the space-time of power: «Father», «Master», «Leader» and «Judge». Special attention is paid to the dialectic of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the chronological in the dynamics of Kozhev’s power. It is concluded that for Kozhev, power is always a living whole (a combination of «pure» types), which has its own genesis, its own field and duration of action, and its own death. It is proved that Kozhev’s philosophical concept remained incomplete, especially in the field of philosophy of law and philosophy of history. The analysis is based on Kozhev’s treatises: The Concept of Power, Introduction to Hegel’s Readings, Essay on the Phenomenology of Law, Tyranny and Wisdom. Materials of modern researchers, including translators of the philosophical heritage of A. Kozhev, are also extensively involved.

The article attempts to comprehend the issues that arise in connection with the spread of transdisciplinary strategies.These are questions to actualize the consideration of transdisciplinarity, as a phenomenon hierarchically associated with an interdisciplinary form of human activity, which is considered as a heuristic primordial foundation of the modern stylistics of philosophizing. It clarifies, redefines, through the filter of the existential problems to be solved, the generally accepted provisions and laws of disciplinary knowledge, using the paradoxicality of the reflexive-recursive subject-object relations of postnonclassics. Political subjectivity can be considered a term in social and political philosophy that accounts for the ability to introduce change in the internal and external areas of the political form. Political subjects execute power in different ways and on different levels of the multilevel governance structure. On each level political subjects come into existence, develop and mature and then proceed with deconstruction. Political morphogenesis is a complex phenomenon. The main target for the closed political subjects is self-preservation as these political forms have an in-built development ceiling, whereas the main target for the open political subjects is evolution as a process that is isomorphous with the environment. Political morphogenesis has an interval character: it happens mostly under the circumstances of uncertainty and unpredictability of the political life when the political form’s old parameters of order are no longer functional while the new order parameters have not been established yet. This is the momentum when political entrepreneurs enter the political stage — those are political subjects that extract value from uncertainty by offering a crisis management initiative that eventually leads to the empowerment of the political entrepreneur by granting it more power and a widened authority scope.

The article deals with the philosophical problem of reification in the ontological, gnoseological and axiological aspects. The problem of reification was discovered by Patristics, but the theoretical development of this problem was carried out in Marxist philosophy. In the process of historical formation of a human, matter «polarizes», splits into human subject reality and reificated subject reality, which act as objectively existing fictions in relation to each other. Reification of social reality, which excludes a human as a free subject, does not correspond to human essence, and therefore it acts for a human as a non-genuine reality, generating non-genuine values. Reification (together with its «otherness» — fetishism) generates transformed social forms, through which the concept of fact is problematized. This allows us to propose the following hypothesis: if conditional statements describing causal relations in genuinely human reality are designated as factual, then conditional statements describing causal relations in reificated subjectivity must be designated as counterfactual, and conversely. The objective existence of two mutually exclusive subject worlds places science in the situation of choosing between alternative — human or anti-human — models of reality. At the same time, a human appears as a «macrocosm» in the non-reificated human worldview model, and his human reality is constituted in this empirically valid model by a special social substratum that makes all human individuals essentially identical to each other. When describing and explaining social processes, it makes sense to specify which of the two mutually exclusive realities — the reificated or the human one — is being considered in each case.

Today we are witnessing significant cultural changes. The new model of culture can no longer be hierarchical and base on binary structures. The tree model is changing to the rhizome model. Rizome offers a high level of freedom in making new connections that generate cultural reality. Big narrative as a normative instance is being replaced by separate discourses that dictate norms only within themselves. In this article, we explore how the specificity of different discourses (legislative discourse, discourses of the art world and public opinion) affects the representation in them of such cultural phenomena as graffiti and street art works. From a legal point of view, graffiti and illegal street art are acts of vandalism and deserve punishment. The legislative branch operates in the field of two concepts — «permitted»/«prohibited». The semantic space of the legislative discourse has retained a binary structure and hierarchical organization. The discourse generated by the institutions of the art world is very mobile, the binary structure and hierarchical organization of its semantic space have disappeared. There obviously takes place the rhizome principle of organizing the normative space of the art world and the increasing role of the individual principle in the formation of a discursive statement. These features of the discourse created an opportunity for street artists to enter the world of art. The study of the discourse of public opinion was carried out through sociological research. Most young people not only distinguish graffiti from vandalism but are also ready to see it as a form of contemporary art. We explain the clear correlation in the responses of young people in different cities by a single media space. The results of the study confirm the disintegration of a single normative space and its replacement by local (specific) discourses.

One of the core objectives of dance philosophy is research into dance movements as the main means of artistic expression in choreography. This article aims to break the tether of semiotic interpretation of dance movements, to analyze them outside the context of any corporal movement-based practice, and to determine their ontological base, being an irrevocable and immanent quality of human nature itself. Based on various research works in the fields of philosophy, culture studies and art studies, the nature and specific features of the choreographic arts’ expressive language are defined. Semiotic approach to the expressive specifics of dance movements is critically re-evaluated. Its limitations connected with the interpretation of the nature of dance movements in the context of understanding the nature of art are substantiated. With the help of the method of phenomenological reduction, the dance is represented as an independent phenomenon. Three important qualities of the nature of dance movements are identified: they occur spontaneously under the influence of positive emotions, have a connection with a person’s special mental state, contribute to the harmonization of a person’s lifeworld. Dancing is characterized by «happiness affect», being a source of an individual’s motional activity. This is the state of happiness, positive and joyful emotions that direct a person towards self-actualization. The research is novel in that it defines the ontological aspect of dance movements as those occurring as a result of the «happiness affect» and transferring the energy arising in the human body into an objectified form. Feeling the increased ability of their body to act and its internal energy, doing dance movements, a person experiences satisfaction and joy, and as a result harmony fills their lifeworld.

According the psycho-lexical hypothesis, any substantial individual differences in human behavior, emotions, cognition and motivation are supposed to be reflected in the language, which means that by analyzing the language one will be able to identify these differences. Further, using the factor analysis of self-reported individual differences, it is possible to identify the structure of personality traits. For example, based on a psycho-lexical study of English descriptors, the Big Five has been articulated. Meanwhile, the Russian taxonomy of personality traits has remained understudied. In the present article, we discuss some aspects of the organization of a psycho-lexical study. First, we analyze possible sources for the initial analysis of a language: free self-descriptions, everyday talks, dictionaries, etc. A conclusion is made about the advantage of using lists, normally dictionaries, compiled by professional linguists. In our future study, we also plan to use a similar list, namely, a corpus of the Russian language. Second, possible parts of speech taken as a basis for the analysis of words are discussed. Usually researchers focus on adjectives, less often they add nouns to the list. However, the analysis of scientific literature shows the need to use all possible parts of speech for such a study. In our research, we plan to use adjectives, nouns, adverbs, and verbs. Third, features of German and Dutch word selection methodologies are analyzed. We conclude that the German methodology may be preferable to the Dutch methodology in some aspects; therefore, we plan to employ the former in our study. Finally, the need for a psycho-lexical study in Russian and its blueprint are discussed.

The paper deals with the problem of determining the zones of predictive accuracy of everyday perception. We studied implicit representations of women about the satisfaction with marriage among males with contrasting personality traits. The research involved 100 females aged from 17 to 48 (M = 22.11, SD = 4.23). At the first stage, the respondents filled out the Big Five-2 questionnaire. After that, they studied the responses to the same questionnaire supposedly given by a man with one of the four traits vividly expressed: extraversion, introversion, benevolence, or hostility. The participants were then asked to fill out the Marriage Satisfaction Questionnaire in the way they thought this man would do it. The data were analyzed using ANOVA. It was found that women attribute the same level of satisfaction with marriage to extroverted and introverted men. These judgments appear to be based on a projection mechanism, which is manifested in the fact that subjects with high extraversion predict a more successful marriage for an extrovert, and introverted subjects attribute an equally successful marriage to both an introvert and an extrovert. Thus, taking the projective intervention into account, it can be concluded that the implicit theory of the extraverted personality is consistent with research data on links between extraversion and subjective well-being. Women also ascribed significantly higher marital satisfaction to the benevolent men than to the hostile ones. This indicates that the implicit theory of benevolent personality does not reproduce the objective variability of interpersonal interaction scenarios of such a personality. The results obtained expand the understanding of the implicit theories limitations and can be helpful in preventing cognitive distortions in the field of social perception.

The development of social network sites (SNS) entails expanded opportunities for self-presentation and changes in interpersonal interactions. The social network platform Instagram, focused on the visual presentation of information and images of users, provides a variety of opportunities for their self-presentation. Active research established that the specifics of the manifestation of realistic and false self-presentation in social networks is related to social anxiety, attention and admiration seeking, and idealization of the authentic self. The connection between self-presentation and personality traits, in particular, with the Dark Triad symptom complex (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) is most clearly manifested for narcissism as a search for admiration from others. At the same time, the question of how other people perceive the image of the SNS user remains open. In this study we assessed the images of a user of the social networking service Instagram according to the characteristics of self-presentation (attractiveness, realism, desire to impress, and demonstrativeness); attitude components (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) and Dark Triad traits of the study participants. Attitude components are positively associated with attractiveness and realism of the image on the social network but did not show any connection with the desire to impress and demonstrativeness. The traits of the Dark Triad, on the contrary, raise doubts about the realism of the presented image, which can be considered as a predisposition to recognize deception on social networking sites. Narcissism reduces while psychopathy increases the evaluation of Instagram users’ desire to impress others. Machiavellianism and psychopathy negatively contribute to the attitude toward the Instagram user and evaluation of their self-presentation. However, the Dark Triad features also lead to an underestimation of the intellectual and emotional characteristics of the other. As a result, this decreases the desire to interact with them, which probably reduces the likelihood of positive responses in the SNS.

The paper deals with the social phenomenon «organizational trust». The importance of organizational trust as a mechanism for the stable functioning of a modern organization in conditions of the socio-cultural and socio-economic environment being under risk is substantiated. The feasibility of a sociological analysis of trust in an organization with the purpose of enhancing its efficiency and productivity is demonstrated. The essence of «organizational trust» is defined as a phenomenon of positive expectations due to which the principal is ready to ascribe good intentions to the trustees and be confident about their words and actions. Benevolence and competence of trustees are demonstrated to be necessary conditions for the formation of a high level of trust in an organization. Based on the analysis of materials from foreign sociological studies, the types of organizational trust are differentiated: generalized, vertical and horizontal, and their specific characteristics are identified. Generalized trust is found to be based on past experience of interactions, this is the expectation of future gains. It is emphasized that vertical and horizontal organizational types of trust have the property of functionality, i.e. they are limited by the professional roles of employees. The evidence base indicates that employee relationships based on trust are one of the conditions for effective labor activity in a modern organization. It has been found that the trust of employees increases their commitment to the organization and job satisfaction, contributes to strengthening the cooperation and teamwork. The expediency of empirical verification of theoretical propositions is substantiated, in particular of the idea that organizational trust has a positive effect on the efficiency and productivity of the modern organization`s development: the higher the trust in the organization, the higher its ability to achieve its strategic, tactical, operational goals, ensure labor productivity, produce innovations, maintain high staff motivation and a favorable socio-psychological climate.

The requirements for university graduates include the possession of research skills, which implies the inclusion of this type of activity in the curriculum. Research work of students is included in both compulsory types of work and those performed at will of the student himself (over and above the curriculum), the latter being associated with a high level of students’ motivation. The article aims to analyze the structure of students’ motivation for carrying out research work at university and to identify its connection with the orientation of young people to building an academic career at university after graduation. The methodology is based on Talcott Parsons’ model of reference variables. It allowed us to describe the motivation of students at the theoretical level. Some of the selected theoretical positions (affective neutrality, self-orientation) were tested using empirical material collected through a survey of students of Perm national research universities (Perm State University, Perm National Research Politechnic University, Higher School of Economics – Perm). Based on the ideas of T.V. Razina and other researchers of motivation, we developed and tested a methodology for identifying the structure of students’ motivation to conducting research work at university. The following were identified as the most pronounced motives of the interviewed students: firstly, they carry out research work for self-development in the broad sense of the word; secondly, the process itself provides them with interest. Cluster analysis made it possible to classify respondents into 4 groups, based on the specifics of their motivation: strategists, enthusiasts, dependents, and and random people. A connection was revealed between the specifics of students’ motivation and their determination to build an academic career at university after graduation. As a result, we were able to identify and describe the group of students who are more determined to devote themselves to research work in the future. The paper proposes a number of recommendations for scientific supervisors and managing personnel of universities, which can be helpful in building the personnel policy of universities.