The “World Soul” in India

Frazier distinguishes four possible forms of “world soul” theory in the Vedāntic tradition—soul as shared substance, shared order, shared consciousness, and shared causality. She focuses on one Indian genealogy of reflection on the last, looking at the way that the pivotal concept of śakti, an energy or capacity, allowed Vedāntic philosophy to evolve a new understanding of complex causality. Whereas Rāmānuja focused on the centralized causality of God as a single world-agency, Rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmī subtly rebelled against this. They used aesthetic theory to develop a new appreciation of the way that a complex array of subsidiary agencies (i.e., created individual wills) facilitates new and precious emergent phenomena of relationship, motivation, drama, and affective experience—all things that a single ‘agency would not be able to generate alone. The resulting “fulfilled-capacity monism” or pūrṇa-śakti vedānta models a world soul with not only originative causality that channels a single agency, but also developmental causality that evolves novel features of intra-relationality.

Assessment Relativism and the Truth-Predicate

The purpose of this paper is to argue that assessment relativism entails the assessment-sensitivity of the sentential truth-predicate, but not of the propositional truth-predicate. The central idea of assessment relativism is that a single token claim evaluated within a single world can have different truth-values when considered in different contexts of assessment. John MacFarlane in Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications (2014) and also Max Kölbel in the article ‘Global relativism and self-refutation’ (2011) have argued that this position leads to relativism about the propositional truth-predicate. I argue that this is not the case—it entails relativism only about the sentential truth-predicate.

Cultural universalization of consumption in the context of globalization

The paper is devoted to the cultural universalization of consumption in the context of globalization. It is shown that national communities today are not considered as political entities, but rather as economic entities, parts of the consumer market. Globalization leads to the creation of a single world, but not of an open and varied world. This world does not have a pluralistic and cosmopolitan view of itself and others, but, on the contrary, is rather a single commodity world. In it, local cultures and identities lose their roots and are replaced by symbols of the commodity world.

Mass aesthetic changes in the context of the development of world museums

This article is relevant, as in the process when the world community is experiencing crisis phenomena in the public consciousness and social forms of existence, the change of the museum as an accumulator of works of art and cultural centres acquires historical significance. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that exhibitions can be held not only online or during the period when museums act as cultural centres. The purpose of the study is to research the aesthetic changes in the context of global art communication through exhibition areas in the world of museums. The leading research method was comparative analysis, thanks to which mass aesthetic changes in the process of changing the global socio-economic environment were studied. The basis for the work of UNESCO as a global repository and management centre in the museum community was shown. The authors note that the formation of museum competence and a change in the aesthetics of mass consciousness on this basis is possible only if the structural content of the coordination of museum art. The authors see the creation of a single-world museum centre as the basis for such a change.

Counterfactuals and Undefinedness: Homogeneity vs. Supervaluations

Theories of counterfactuals agree on appealing to a relation of comparative similarity, but disagree on the quantificational force of counterfactuals. We report on two experiments testing the predictions of three main approaches: universal theories, homogeneity theories, and single-world selection theories (plus supervaluations over selection functions). The critical cases in our experiment were constructed so as to discriminate between the three theories. Our results provide empirical support for the selectional theories, while challenging the other two approaches.

Making Mistakes Saves the Single World of the Extended Wigner’s Friend Experiment

The Extended Wigner’s Friend thought experiment comprising a quantum system containing an agent who draws conclusions, upon observing the outcome of a measurement of a qubit prepared in two non-orthogonal versions by another agent led its authors to conclude that quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself. It has also been proposed that this thought experiment is equivalent to coherent entangled state (Bell type) experiments. It is argued in this paper that the assumption of the freedom of choice of the first Wigner’s friend invalidates such equivalency. It is also argued that the assumption of locality (physical space) introduces superfluous identity of indiscernibles metric axiom, which is invalid in quantum domain and generally disproven by the Ugly duckling mathematical theorem.

Digital maturity of territories during digital transformation

The formation of a full-fledged digital national economy integrated into a single world order is today’s trend. Under a single technological human habitat, it is necessary to understand territories as separate systemic mechanisms of the state, lined up in a logical sequence region-city-municipality city-municipality of each element’s region position to the previous and subsequent ones. That is consideration of the socio-economic development of the system from the standpoint of the agglomeration effect. Based on the above, the article considered various approaches to identifying a territory from the point of view of digital maturity in the global digital transformation process. The existing methods for assessing the digital maturity of Russian regions are considered, groups of metrics for such an assessment are given, and a critical assessment of existing methods is given to develop new ones or improve old ones. The rationale for this is the ability to track digital transformation dynamics through the digital maturity of territories.

GLOBALIZATION AND WESTERNIZATION: HORIZONS OF “IDENTIFICATION” AND “DISCRIMINATION”

The scientific relevance of distinguishing between “globalization” and “westernization” is due to the political requirement for the implementation of the “world economic order” in the liberal version of the “economic paradigm” (J. Agamben) of the social. Methodologically, one should distinguish between scientific/disciplinary analysis and philosophical interpretation of globalization; “Distinction” (“drawing boundaries”) is the exclusive prerogative of philosophy (M. Heidegger) and presupposes the presence of the concept of globalization (“radical metaphysical concept”) as “the unity of reality and meaning” the condition for the possibility of a «radical concept» is the ordering of perspectives/points of view in the horizon of a certain paradigm of the social; the dominance of the “economic paradigm” in Western European social science determines the formulation of the question regarding the subject of research, the way of its thematization and the area in which the distinction between “globalization” and “Westernization” is important: Westernization is a necessary aspect of globalization as a world order, along with “excluded localities” defined as a result of interpretation as “bipolar”; the distinction between “material” and “cosmological” values (in the terminology of D. Lala) presupposes the homogenization of the world order and the interpretation of “features” in terms of culture; the “remnant” not reduced to culture is interpreted as “absolutely different” and “locked up” in locality as a “prison” (Z. Bauman); sustainability is provided as a “balancing equilibrium” of the Westernized (“universal”) and “other” (“locality”) levels of the world order; the redistribution of power between the main actors/competitors of a single world order does not have a significant impact and is not relevant for distinguishing between “globalization” and “westernization” in terms of philosophical interpretation; “Civilizational paradigm” (S. Huntington) and “planetarism” (existential-historical thinking of M. Heidegger) are marginal for the approach to the study of globalization prevailing in the “positive sciences”, but they are of fundamental importance for its philosophical interpretation.

Beyond a Single World: Pedagogy and Relating in Difference

The central notion of my analysis is that the relational values that are privileged by the feminine, if properly addressed in school, could foster a more inclusive and embodied way of addressing the fundamentally masculine origin of knowledge, curriculum planning as well as daily school rituals and cultures. For this reason I evoke the horizon of sense as captured by Irigaray in her two-ness of the world to designate a positive place for feminine subjectivity in the relational economy of the you and I, her and him. The economy of the placenta is evoked as a new form of connectedness enfolding a new kind of communication in a pedagogical interaction - where multiplicities and differences are privileged over sameness. ‘Touch’ is given primacy in the formation of a dialogue that does not appropriate but instead evokes the sharing of a desire in the two-ness of the world.