ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF TECHNOLOGY: CATEGORIAL ANALYSIS

The article reveals the ontological essence of technology on the basis of identifying categories that reflect the meaning of technology at various stages of the development of society. Categories: copying, serving, overcoming, production, progress, process, revolution, science, technogenic environment, technosphere, noosphere, alienation force, pollution factor, collective intelligence, technical reality, technotronic civilization, transformation - they consistently reveal the ontology of technology. The significance of the Kappa concept of technology, which defines technology as an extension of a human being, is shown. The influence of the historical context in the formation of categories describing the essence of technology is revealed. Much attention is paid to the inconsistency, multidimensionality of the phenomenon of technology. The article defines the specifics of using the categories of technogenic environment and technosphere. The significance of the natural scientific concept of the noosphere is shown. The analysis of the features of the fifth technological revolution is given, the prospects for the formation of a technotronic society are shown. It has been established that the most important ontological basis of the phenomenon of technology is the anthropological component, which does not remain constant. The question is raised about the possibility of self-sufficiency of technology in the ontological sense, the formation of its independence from a person and the likelihood of such a scenario. The technotronic civilization is just being formed and the prospects for its development are not unambiguous, technology can acquire new, completely unexpected qualities, which requires further research.

“To Believe in an Image (Again)”

In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.

Time Dilation and the Equivalence of Inertial Frames

It is well known that simultaneity within an inertial frame is defined in relativity theory by a convention or definition. This definition leads to different simultaneities across inertial frames and the well-known principle of relativity of simultaneity. The lack of a universal present implies the existence of past, present and future as a collection of events on a four dimensional manifold or continuum wherein three dimensions are space like and one dimension is time like. However, such a continuum precludes the possibility of evolution of future from the present as all events exist ‘forever’ so to speak on the continuum with the tenses past, present and future merely being perceptions of different inertial frames. Such a far-reaching ontological concept, created by a mere convention, is yet to gain full acceptance. In this paper, we present arguments in favour of an absolute present, which means simultaneous events are simultaneous in all inertial frames, and subscribe to evolution of future from the present.

S.N. Durylin’s Easter story “On someone else's grave”: genre update

The article explores poetics of the unpublished Easter story by S.N. Durylin “On an unrelated grave” (1922). The story is important mainly because the author manages to renew the genre not only by returning to the original spiritual meanings, but also presenting the unique ontological project. Taking into account the experience of the predecessors-classics, first of all, A.P. Chekhov and his story “Holy night” (1886), the writer expands possibilities of the biblical subtext by creating an intertextual evangelical plot that unfolds in parallel with the main one. Using modernist experience of L.N. Andreev and M. Gorky, the symbolist writers, Durylin disputes it, disagreeing with travesty and fantastic versions of the interpretation of Easter story. The author depicts the plot of the resurrection of the soul of the main character Andrei Omutov, who, experiencing the tragic death of his mother, thinks about eternity for the first time. The author’s ontological concept, affirming infinity and the absence of boundaries, is expressed by the special construction of the temporal triad “past — present — future”. The idea of transcendental reality, suggesting Absolute, is formed by alternating passages in present and future tense: these are descriptions of mother’ existence and church hymns quotations. In the past tense, the story of hero’s childhood and his mother’s death are given. The spiritual path to the eternal “to be” represents the inner plot of this story. The milestones of this plot are intertextually indicated by Easter exapostillarium, which is quoted three times: in the epigraph, at the time when it sounds at Easter services and, finally, on a grave of a stranger during matin service, conducted by Father Alexander, when the hero’s spiritual resurrection occurs.

Slaughtering a cow in early childhood education: Pedagogic meetings with destruction as change

This article explores the concept of change in education through an examination of the entangled processes of destruction and creation made visible during a Norwegian kindergarten’s tradition of participating in a cow-slaughter in its local community. The article offers a methodological exploration, activating the theoretical perspectives of relational ontology, plasticity and critical animal studies. We present the event as a narrative and analyze it through these three perspectives, with special attention paid to unintentional change and change as an ontological concept. The discussion illuminates how children grasped destruction as change through creativity and play, and how ethical complexities are entangled with education, animal-based food production, traditions, play, and research.

André Bazin's Eternal Returns: An Ontological Revision

The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases ten-fold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of “ontology.” This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple (“Bazin and ontology”) nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the “immemorial image” which, like Bazin's “Death Every Afternoon,” presents an eminently repeatable deathly image, an animated corpse-world that can be likened to hell.

The formation of the ontological concept of the “status of things” in the beginning of the 16th – the first half of the 17th centuries Jesuit metaphysics and theology

This article is a study of a new type of metaphysics that arose within the tradition of scholastic philosophy and theology of the Jesuits by the middle of the 17th century. The article describes the opposition of the traditional and new understanding of scholastic metaphysics on the example of Fr. Suárez and S. Izquierdo. The formation of the ontological concept of "status of things" is identified as one of the key conditions and signs of this transformation of metaphysics. First, the formation of this concept is explored in the scholastic tradition preceding Izquierdo, namely in Fonseca, Suárez, Hurtado de Mendoza and Fabri, as a history of shifts in meaning and of the emergence of new contexts in which the term "status" was used. Second, we describe the systematic context of the doctrine of the status rerum in the universal theory of objects of human thought in Izquierdo's Pharus scientiarum (1659). Thirdly, we explicate the very concept of the status of a thing in the first philosophy of Izquierdo, its necessary connection with the concept of the objective truth of a thing, and also show the special significance of the first "quidditative status of things" as a whole set of objective truths underlying all demonstrative human sciences. Finally, the article points out that one of the essential features of Izquierdo's new metaphysics is the strengthening of the methodological nature of the universal science recorded in his treatise in comparison with the traditional Jesuit prototype in Suárez.

Disease specificity and evidence-based medicine: a historical perspective

This paper seeks to inform the current debate on an alleged ‘crisis’ and the ‘unintended negative consequences’ of evidence-based medicine (EBM) from a historical perspective. EBM can be placed against the background of a long term process of medical quantification and objectification. This long term process was accompanied by a ‘specificity revolution’, which made the ontological concept of diseases as specific entities the central ordering and regulatory principle in healthcare (as well as in clinical epidemiology and EBM). To a certain extent, the debate about EBM’s alleged crisis can be understood as resulting from this specificity revolution. When the ontological concept of disease is applied too rigidly, this will contribute to ‘negative unintended consequences’ of EBM such as ‘poor mapping of multimorbidity’ and medical practice ‘that is management-driven rather than patient-centered’.