Alexey Navalny: A hero of the new time

Russian leaders first tried to poison him, then unlawfully imprisoned him, and now are publicly torturing him. His enemies see him as an illegitimate pretender to the Russian throne. His fans are captivated by his ability to survive assassinations and withstand torture. I was among those who nominated Alexey Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize. Though he has not received it, this failure exposes meaningful though underappreciated truths about Russia and about the world. My story will leap back and forward between Navalny’s individual actions, the peculiarities of Putinism, and global issues of neoliberal governance.

The ‘I’ in the Monad: Leibniz and the Essential Indexical

Some modern and contemporary philosophers argue that the first-person indexical plays an essential role in the explanation of individual actions. As such it cannot be explained away or replaced by a co-referring term without destroying the cognitive force that its use conveys. There are important aspects of Leibniz’s work that anticipate the view of the essential indexical. The activity in the monad, such as the petites perceptions and appetitions, plays the cognitive role of grounding indexical reference and uses of the first-person pronoun to explain an agent’s perspective and behaviour.

Agroecological Accounting Issues in the Aspect of the Interaction of Agriculture with the Environment

The subject of this study is agroecological activity that combines the goals of agricultural production with maximum consideration of the tasks of environmental protection and rational use of natural resources, as well as the corresponding indicators that allow tracking the process and the main results of the considered integrated activity. A comprehensive comparative analysis of the conceptual apparatus and main definitions defining the sphere of interests of agroecology, agroecological accounting and statistics, used by various scientific institutions and individual scientists in specialized international organizations, primarily FAO, OECD, European Association for Agroecology, Eurostat and some other similar structures, in the CIS countries, Spain, Brazil and a number of other states, as well as in the French Ministry of Agriculture and the US Department of Agriculture. The objects of the analysis were mainly the approaches of various international organizations to defining the scope and structure of agroecological measures and individual actions, including the proposed accounting and statistical indicators. Particular attention is paid to the problem of organic agricultural production, i.e. the release of organic agricultural products and its place in the composition of agroecological statistics.

Reconstruction of the Motives and Goals of the First Colonizers of Siberia Based on the Materials of the Russian Colonization of the Far East

The article reconstructs individual characteristics of the subjects of the initial colonization of Siberia and the Far East and episodes of their advance to new lands. The main methodological approach of the research is the principle of historicism, as well as the principle of “activity constitutes”, widespread in psychological science, according to which identical activities and external conditions should give rise to similar worldview systems. On the basis of this premise, the possibility of judgments by analogy is substantiated in relation to the motives and goals of the first colonizers of Siberia based on the materials of the development of the Far East by the Russians. On the basis of materials of personal origin, the author examines the strategies of legitimizing individual actions of the pioneers through forcing the factor of external threat, as well as using the idea of “state good”. The colonialists use these arguments as a justification for their own actions in the east. At the same time, the acts of colonization undertaken by them have an adventurous connotation characterized by actions with a pronounced emotional component of the decisions made. The problems of relations with aborigines are considered separately. It is concluded that the idea of “peaceful peasant colonization”, which has a civilizing significance for the local population is untenable, as well as the conventionality of the transition of the aborigines under the authority of the Moscow government, which is fully realized by the pioneers.

L’Osservatorio della Provincia autonoma di Trento

The Landscape Observatory of the Autonomous Province of Trento has been active since 2010. Over the decade, the Observatory has established new forms of landscape management, starting from the assumption that a pleasant landscape is the result of responsible individual actions and collective initiatives. The experiences presented in this short essay describe the outcomes of an activity aimed at citizens, public administrators, and professionals in the field, with the purpose of encouraging an increasing awareness through the development of operational strategies and effective technical approaches.

Against Seizing the Day

On a widely accepted view, what gives meaning to our lives is success in valuable ground projects. However, philosophers like Kieran Setiya have recently challenged the value of such orientation toward the future, and argued that meaningful living is instead a matter of engaging in atelic activities that are complete in themselves at each moment. This chapter argues that insofar as what is at issue is meaningfulness in its primary existential sense, strongly atelic activities do not suffice for meaning. Instead, finding one’s life meaningful is warranted both by sustainable success in valuable prospective (future-oriented) projects and by success in reflexive projects that aim to promote or realize a practice-dependent value that can be realized at each moment, but never for good. Activities of the latter kind are only weakly atelic, since their aim remains distinct from the activity, and individual actions gain significance from serving a long-term commitment. Thus, whether our ground projects are prospective or reflexive, what we do at each moment contributes to leading a meaningful life only when it’s connected in the right way to what we do at other moments.

A Vector-agent Approach to (Spatiotemporal) Movement Modelling and Reasoning

Modelling a complex system of autonomous individuals moving through space and time essentially entails understanding the (heterogeneous) spatiotemporal context, interactions with other individuals, their internal states and making any underlying causal interrelationships explicit, a task for which agents (including vector-agents) are specifically well-suited. Building on a conceptual model of agent space-time and reasoning behaviour, a design guideline for an implemented vector-agent model is presented in this article as an example. The movement of football players was chosen as it is appropriately constrained in possible space, time and individual actions. Sensitivity-variability analysis was applied to measure the performance of different configurations of system components on the emergent movement patterns. The model output varied more when the condition of the contextual actors (players’ role-areas) were manipulated. In conclusion, ABMs can contribute to our understanding of movement and how causally-relevant evidence could be produced, through a proposed agent equipped with active causal knowledge.

Eye protection in interventional procedures

Data suggest that radiation-induced cataracts may form without a threshold and at low-radiation doses. Staff involved in interventional radiology and cardiology fluoroscopy-guided procedures have the potential to be exposed to radiation levels that may lead to eye lens injury and the occurrence of opacifications have been reported. Estimates of lens dose for various fluoroscopy procedures and predicted annual dosages have been provided in numerous publications. Available tools for eye lens radiation protection include accessory shields, drapes and glasses. While some tools are valuable, others provide limited protection to the eye. Reducing patient radiation dose will also reduce occupational exposure. Significant variability in reported dose measurements indicate dose levels are highly dependent on individual actions and exposure reduction is possible. Further follow-up studies of staff lens opacification are recommended along with eye lens dose measurements under current clinical practice conditions.