Publications

This article is about the conception of the tyranny in the European Political Thought of the Middle Ages. The author begins with the traditional distinction between a good and a bad governor.  Within this dichotomy, the king is a good and fair ruler, whose thoughts are about a commonweal and a public good; in turn, the tyrant is a governor whose thoughts and acts are towards his personal good and interests. But - the author stresses this point - this conception in effect appeared late enough, at 12th or 13th cent.

The author analyses this fact, stressing that within the European Political thought of the Middle Ages it seems possible to define two principal modes of speaking on the Political: the theological and the juridical one. In turn, within the theological mode, we find two main branches, which are the political Augustinism and the political Thomism. The first one is a direct successor of the Roman Republican tradition developed by Cicero and, later, by the Roman jurists. Within this tradition, the main hero of the political theory is a people, which is considered as an autonomous subject, able to legislate and to define his proper public good. The other, Thomistic paradigm, interprets a people as a multitude united by a common area, laws and mode of life, a pure object of the political action, exercised by kings and other rulers. The author stresses, including on the ground of the Siete Partidas, that the real theory of the tyranny is possible only within the frames of the Thomistic paradigm.

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss (Seligkeit) assumes central importance throughout Schelling's oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810-11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero-point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here (from God before creation, via the natural, historical, and spiritual world, to the fully actualized, "true pantheism") and to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling's best efforts to theorize it as "love"; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity's foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling's conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present and the eschatological – as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity (with what is often called its process of "secularization") – not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves.

In this paper, I would like to examine the meaning of and relationship between ‘practice’ and ‘ideology’ in Boris Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia”.  I propose that for Hessen, practice can be defined as the transformation of things in-themselves into things for-us, as well as the transformation of things in-themselves into things for-themselves.  Ideology, for him, refers to the specific difference between practice and theory, when the practical roots of theory are concealed.  In section 1, I explain the Hessen theses and identify means and relations of production as the two kinds of practice presented in the Newton paper.  In section 2, I trace the history of the composition and reception of the Hessen theses, showing that any attempt to understand practice and ideology in Hessen’s work requires incorporating his not only Marxist, but Deborinite background.  In section 3, I explain conceptions of practice and ideology from previous Marxist thinkers and how Hessen, as a Deborinite, may have integrated aspects of these conceptions into his own view.  In section 4, I show that Nikolai Bukharin’s “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism” provides the proper complement for understanding the remaining elements of Hessen’s account.

Malevich has usually perceived as revolutionist and iconoclast, and completely not as divine worshiper.  Meanwhile, those are two interconnected sides of his intellectual activity, and probably his way of glorification of God demanded revolutionary form at his time. In this article, I would like to show Malevich not only as art theorist, as it ordinarily applied, but as metaphysician, and even religious metaphysician. Still it can be said, that Malevich’s theoretical legacy haven’t been understood properly. The situation is this because only ten years has passed since the most complete collected edition of his works by the editorship of Alexandra Shatskikh have seen the light of the day. 

Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age makes a powerful case for the autonomy of modernity with regard to the preceding Christian epoch – but it also emphasizes at least one continuity between the two, which can be framed via what Blumenberg casts as their common enemy: Gnosticism. Far from being external or secondary, this opposition to Gnosticism structurally defines both of these epochs as their task. What is, however, at stake in this common task? Reading with and against Blumenberg – and following his own account of the epochal shift to modernity – we will shed light, first, on the genealogy and, secondly, the political theology of Blumenbergian modernity, its structure of sovereignty, and key related concepts, such as the world, position, possibility, legitimation, theodicy, immanence, and self-assertion.

The paper examines in some detail Ficino's relation to concept of λόγοι σπερματικοί, literally ‘seminal reasons’, discussed in his Platonic and Scholastic sources. For instance, Ficino uses such terms as semina rerum, semina formarum, rationes seminales, seminarium mundi, ratio seminaria mundi to indicate the links between species in matter and ideas in mind. Ficino supposes that the World-Soul, producing specific forms and powers of lower things, makes them through her own seminal reasons, which remain in touch with celestial and supercelestial entities. Probably, it is Plotinus who legitimates Ficino’s use of the concept of seminal reasons although, historically, it is the concept of Stoicism. Employing ‘seeds’ as a metaphor for ideas, Plotinus criticizes strongly the Stoic concept of seminal reasons, according to which seminal formative principles are corporeal and immanent to the things. Ficino’s use of embryological metaphors and direct analogies between the action of generating force in the human body and in the ‘body’ of the world serves to explain how a purely intelligible essence (the World-Soul) produces material things. In the paper, I argue that the ‘seminal reasons’ as metaphysical intermediaries should be related to other well-known metaphysical intermediaries in Ficino’s philosophy (spiritus, daemones)

P. Bourdieu borrows a number of ideas and conceptions of G.-V. Leibniz and uses them in his theory of the social space in systematic fashion. The Leibnizean theories of the relation physical space, of the real definition, of the pre-established harmony become the interrelated reflective means of empirical sociology. This article attempts to interpret epistemic significance of the fact that the conceptions of Leibniz have appeared to be fruitful in sociology of Bourdieu. The real definition of the social space is neither direct reflection of social structures nor such purely formal operations of indirect mathematic construction of the social space which could be jettisoned after achievement of the result. The construction of the real definition is included in its result. The objectivity of this definition consists not in achieving the reality of “the things themselves” but in expressing genesis of purely transcendent, not accessible to simple reflection social relations in gradual construction of a system of purely immanent, sensual signs, in numeric dependencies and terms.

The article is devoted to the comparison of M. Mamardashvili`s and H. Arendt`s ideas on the nature of thinking, evil, moral and political actions. Comparing ideas of these two thinkers the following thesis is justified: both authors explore the idea of law as a special type of supernatural community and human solidarity. They also emphasize that to be moral means to practice the thinking (reflection) which is always in process and neverstops.

The article substantiates that uncertainties, instabilities, and fluctuations accompanying the development processes in the modern world not only create difficulties for us, but also form a basis for our individual and collective creativity. The future is open and not given to us in advance, and it is in the power of a man to make a deliberate and measured choice of the further path of development from a whole spectrum of possibilities in states of instability or at points of bifurcation. The world is constructed by men and with their active participation taking into account some preferred images of the future. Such scientists and thinkers of the 20th century as Ilya Prigogine and Ivan Frolov combined philosophy and science and taught us to develop integrative, holistic, interdisciplinary strategies for understanding the present and constructing the future, guided by humanitarian values and a culture of reason.

Nobel prize winner I. Prigogine stands for peace, against the arms race, against the use of science for destruction of man and humanity. In his opinion, in the sphere of human capabilities it is essential to change the trajectory of civilization development. At the bifurcation points, unprecedented changes are possible. Instability is not a sign of weakness, but of the vitality of the system. Globalization should not mean unification, but pluralism and diversity of cultures. Science of the future needs to give a systematic explanation ofmegaera and microcosm. A sign of hope is that interest in studying nature and the desire to participate in cultural life has never been greater than today. We do not need any "post-humanity". Man, as he is today, with all his problems, joys and sorrows, is able to understand this and to keep himself in the next generations. The challenge is to find a narrow path between globalization and preservation of cultural pluralism, between violence and political solutions, between the culture of war and the culture of reason.

This paper develops the libertarian deliberative externalist account of free will. In the first part, I discuss some problems with the existing libertarian theories using Kane’s theory of ultimate responsibility and O’Connors agent-causal theory as paradigmatic examples. I argue that some of the main problems of these theories are due to the isolation of the agent from the external world and to the weakening of the necessary connection between the agent’s personality and his actions. In the second part, I propose an alternative externalist account of libertarian freedom. I defend an externalist account of reasons for action that emphasize the importance of the objective facts in reasoning and decision-making process. Then I propose an account of the decision-making process that is indeterministically sensitive to the objective reasons for action. I argue that this account preserves both alternative possibilities and full causal control over the action. It although illuminates that some degree of luck is immanent to every decision making process.

In this chapter we are going to examine the logical connections between various descriptions of the Scientific Revolution proposed by Alexandre Koyré. We are going to propose an attentive and detailed reading of texts written by Koyré in different periods of his life in order to identify various aspects of his interpretation of the revolution in thought that occurred in early modern Europe. His most famous description of the Scientific Revolution (the dual characterization) indicates two aspects of the process that led to the emergence of classical physics: “destruction of the Cosmos” and “geometrization of space”. However, Koyré frequently used other expressions for characterization of the period, such as “mathematization of Nature”, or transition “from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision” and “from the closed world to the open universe”. We could expect that Koyré would try to reduce his initial dual characterization to one single formula. I argue here that, on the contrary, the duality of description had a special meaning which permits us to keep in focus the complexity of the intellectual change that occurred during 17th century, when new science was rising from a new conception of reality, and a new world-view was emerging from the new science

Der Sammelband vereint herausragende Beiträge der Konferenz Welt und Wissenschaft 2017 an der National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moskau.