Dostoevsky's Christianity

The article refutes the widespread view that Dostoevsky's Christian beliefs were strictly Orthodox. It is proved that Dostoevsky's religious and philosophical searches' central tendency is the criticism of historical, ecclesiastical Christianity as a false, distorted form of the teaching of Jesus Christ and the desire to restore this teaching in its original purity. Modern researchers of the history of early Christianity find more and more arguments in favor of the fact that the actual teaching of Jesus Christ is contained in that religious movement, which the church called the Gnostic heresy. The exact philosophical expression of the teaching of Christ was received in the later works of J.G. Fichte, whose ideas had a strong influence on the Russian writer. Like Fichte, Dostoevsky understands Christ as the first person who showed the possibility of revealing God in himself and gaining divine omnipotence and eternal life directly in earthly reality. In this sense, every person can become like Christ. Dostoevsky's main characters walk the path of Christ and show how difficult this path is. The article shows that Dostoevsky used in his work not only the philosophical version of true (Gnostic) Christianity developed by German philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but also the key motives of the Gnostic myth, primarily the idea that our world, filled with evil and suffering, is created not by the supreme, good God-Father, but by the evil Demiurge, the Devil (in this sense, it is hell).

»Philosophy […] Is the Theory of Education in Its Most General Phases«

»Philosophy […] Is the Theory of Education in Its Most General Phases«. Critical Remarks On Some Relationships between Philosophy and Education Following John Dewey In contrast to the widespread view that education is a subfield and field of application of practical philosophy, John Dewey understood philosophy altogether as a general theory of education. The article reconstructs this perspective in Dewey’s main pedagogical work »Democracy and Education« as well as in his 1929 paper »The Sources of a Science of Education«. Afterwards, two other relationships between philosophy and education will be contrasted, the so-called Isms approach and the configuration in which philosophy is one of the so-called ›foundation disciplines‹ dealing with education as an applied field. In an outlook, current changes in the relationship between philosophy and education will be discussed.

Durkheim, the Action Française and the Question of Nationalism

This article concerns Émile Durkheim’s critique of the Action Française as expressed in his seminal articles of 1898, which was an important moment in the Dreyfus Affair, where Durkheim’s active engagement serves to challenge a still widespread view of him as a latter day traditionalist and positivist, He developed epistemological and political arguments against this proto-fascist movement, which have implications for his accounts of nationalism and internationalism.

Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring their performance contexts when papyri published in 1992 and 2005 yielded fragments of such long poems by Simonides and Archilochus. Another chapter argues against the widespread view that Sappho composed and performed chiefly for audiences of young girls, suggesting instead that she was a virtuoso singer and lyre-player, entertaining men in the elite symposia whose verbal and musical components are explored in several other chapters of the book. Two more volumes of collected papers will follow devoted to later Greek literature and culture.

THE RIGHT OF COMMON SHARED OWNERSHIP: THE ESSENCE AND PROBLEMS OF PROTECTION

The article attempts to rethink the phenomenon of shared ownership, taking into account the conceptof multiple ownership rights to one thing at the same time existing in civil law. The widespread view ofthe right of shared ownership as one right to the same thing belonging to several persons at the same timeis critically evaluated. It is concluded that each co-owner has his own property right, which is limited bythe same rights of other co-owners. The construction of shared ownership is considered in the contextof possession protection proposed in the Concept of the Development of Civil Legislation of the RussianFederation: competition arises between the rights of co-owners, which is won by the possessing co-owner,if, for example, the issue of access to things by other co-owners is resolved. The practical significance of the ideas that common property is a plurality (system) of ownership rights to one thing is shown. In particular, itis proposed to use such a model when resolving conflicts between co-owners when moving into a residentialpremises: the owner who actually uses the residential premises has an advantage over other co-owners andhas the right to prevent other co-owners from moving in until a court decision. The share in the ownershipright is proposed to be considered as a measure of the free exercise by the owner of his rights in the conditionsof multiple ownership rights to one thing.

The Planetary Rift

The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift.

Fictional reference as simulation

According to a widespread view, the author of a fiction makes pretend assertions, which themselves rest on ancillary acts of pretend reference. Fictional discourse is thus asymmetrically dependent upon ‘serious’ (non-fictional) discourse: fictional reference and fictional assertion alike are parasitic on genuine reference and genuine assertion, which they mimic. Recently, however, several authors have criticized the pretence approach. According to the alternative, two-stage model they argue for, fiction and non-fiction are on a par (rather than one being asymmetrically dependent upon the other). This chapter shows how this debate connects with the current controversy about the force/content distinction. A sustained defence of the pretence approach is provided, and the approach is shown to extend to the parafictional uses of fictional names.

Rethinking the (CP)TPP as a Model for Regulation of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the widespread view that the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) provides the most advanced rules for regulating China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It argues that compared to China’s existing World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations, particularly those specifically tailored to it, the CPTPP SOE chapter does not provide more rigorous or workable rules but rather has narrower applications and more carve-outs. More recent US/EU free trade agreements (FTAs) are largely based on the CPTPP SOE chapter. While these FTAs also seek to address some deficiencies in the CPTPP SOE chapter and gradually expand the rules on subsidies and SOEs, the expanded rules are balanced by the inclusion of extensive exceptions. This balanced approach may be used to facilitate multilateral negotiations of SOE rules, but if this approach is adopted, WTO Members will need to be prepared to negotiate with China on replacing the potentially very broad and rigid China-specific WTO rules with more balanced new rules that apply to all members. The likely consequence would be softer rather than stronger disciplines on Chinese SOEs.

On how morphology spreads

A language’s grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term ‘borrowing’ is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.

Frictitious commodities: Virtuality, virtue and value in the carbon economy of repair

What ‘nature’ is being commodified in carbon markets, and why does it matter? How are carbon commodities and ecologies of repair co-produced through carbon forestry? Are the Polanyian notions of ‘fictitious commodification’ and ‘embeddedness’ appropriate for thinking about carbon forestry and voluntary carbon market (VCM) offsets? This article addresses these questions and extends the critical understanding of conservation in the ‘repair mode’ through an analysis that delves deeply into the black box of value production in the VCM. Focusing on the interplay of ‘virtuality’ and ‘virtue’ in the production of one variety of so-called ‘boutique’ blue forest carbon offset, this analysis demonstrates the technical abstractions needed isolate ‘carbon’ and force it into the commodity form create slippages between concrete socio-natures and geographies of offsetting and the imagined natures and geographies of a market environmentalist model of the world. This politics facilitates a dual pathway of accumulation via the material extraction of nature to feed the expansion of industrial growth (the subject of Polanyi’s critique) and, in parallel, through feeding new growth markets for nature-based commodities such as the VCM. These markets promise to repair the damage caused by industrial growth, but can only ‘work’ in the abstract, virtual realm despite entanglement with underlying concrete ecologies of repair. Based on this analysis, this article argues that the widespread view of carbon offsets as ‘embedded’ Polanyian fictitious commodities is incomplete, based on an ontological fallacy that conflates the ways in which concrete and abstracted, virtual ‘natures’ are used to produce value in the contemporary restoration economy. This fallacy implicitly reifies the central fictions and contradictions of carbon markets and the market environmentalist model more broadly. Considering VCM carbon forestry in terms of ‘scale-making’ and ‘world-making’ projects, the article presents an alternative conceptualisation of VCM carbon offsets as intangible ‘frictitious’ commodities that inhabit a complicated and only provisionally stabilised commodity form.