Psychology of Worldviews (selective translation)

The paper presents an author’s translation of fragments of previously unpublished in Russian «Psychology of Worldviews» by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. The excerpts have been chosen to illustrate the basic considerations of the philosopher and psychiatrist regarding the metaphor of the shell introduced to describe a rigid worldview standpoint that people take to obtain support and shelter from the vulnerability and the uncertainty of environment, while, at the same time, paying for the seeming stability and certainty with the loss of their vitality and intensity of experiencing their own life. As Jaspers highlights, the shell as antinomic in its nature, and the inner contradictions related to the antinomies are resolved at the psychological level of existence, when the shell is melted and moulded into a new form, rather than at the level of formal logic, involving the reason. The author also supplies the translation with some comments and his own considerations on the topic.

Philosophical Analysis of the Image of "Artificial Man" in Literary Works of the XIX-XX Centuries

Thanks to the development of modern technologies, there is a feeling that the machine can do anything: write a pseudoscientific article, perform household chores, and remind us of important things. Questions arise: what can't the machine do? What does it mean to be human today? The article examines the versions of how the border between the human and non-human in a person is interpreted in fiction. Such variations of "artificial man" as golem, robot, and artificial intelligence are studied. Created from different materials and animated by different methods, these creatures reflect different ideas about who a person is. We propose two approaches to the idea of creating a "man — artificial man" — mythological and natural science, supported by posthumanist philosophy. The deanthropologizing tendency in literary works anticipates the logic of transhumanism. A person is reduced either to a biological datum (a set of genes, a game of hormones, neural connections), or to intelligence, competing with artificial intelligence and inevitably suffering defeat. The anthropological approach in works of art continues the mythological tradition. Man is thought of as a being endowed with consciousness, which is not reducible to the world. "Artificial man" is a double, an antipode, another, that is, absolutely different, in relation to which a person can establish his own identity.

The Genius of the Artist through the Prism of His Models

The essay, which consists of two parts, analyzes the female images of two great artists Botticelli and Picasso. The essay has the character of an art history study with memoir interweaves. In the first part, the author makes an attempt to decipher the genius of Botticelli using the technique of analyzing the prototype of the artist's heroine and comparing it with the image of a real woman, similar to the Botticelli model. The artist's genius is revealed through the type created by him, in a sense — invariant, of a beautiful woman, the spiritual and material image of which is repeated in reality. The energy of Botticelli's paintings, which is their secret, allowed the author to see in life a real copy of the artist's heroine. Using the archive of preserved personal letters of a beautiful lady, as if she descended from Botticelli's paintings “Spring” and “The Birth of Venus”, the author draws an analogy the epistolary legacy with cinema, when events are described not in strict chronological order, but rather individual important moments and experiences are highlighted and are scaled. According to the letters, the author reconstructs the character of his heroine and hypothetically transfers these character traits to the Botticelli model, about whose character there is almost no evidence left. The second part of the essay is inspired by a photograph of Picasso's wife Olga Khokhlova, preserved in the personal archive of the author's friends. The author embeds his story about the muse and the great love of Picasso and about his other paradoxical models in the circumstances of his personal life, in the situation of his youth, comparing the revolutionary changes in art at the beginning of the XX century with the moods of the representatives of the artistic intelligentsia of the 70s of the past century. The heroines of Picasso and the strange interweaving of the fate of the participants in the author's narrative represent the content of this part of the essay.

Realistic Theory of Classical Analysis and Synthesis

The article shows that all modern theories of analysis and synthesis, on one basis, are divided into classical and non-classical, and on the other, into realistic and anti-realistic. A realistic version of the classical theory, according to which analysis is a real or mental decomposition of the phenomena of the objective and subjective world into components, and synthesis is a real or mental combination of these components into a whole, is considered. The naive understanding of analysis, which includes in its task the cognition of the components of the object under study, and those relations that form it from these components, has been criticized. It is shown that the cognition of such relations is a task of synthesis. The history of the study of the problem of mental synthesis from Plato to modern nominalism is considered. Mental analysis and synthesis are compared with practical ones. Two stages of the history of practical analysis and synthesis are investigated — pre-scientific and scientific. The theories of analysis and synthesis, formed at these stages, are compared.

Analytic Philosophy

The paper provides an overview of the most fundamental ideas representing analytic philosophy throughout its history from the beginning of 20th century up to now. The history of analytic philosophy is divided into two stages – the early and the contemporary ones. The main distinguishing features of early analytic philosophy are using mathematical logic as a tool of stating and solving philosophical problems, and critical attitude toward ‘metaphysics’, i.e., traditional and contemporary non-analytic philosophical theories. The genesis of analytic philosophy was closely related to the revolution in logic that led to the rise of mathematical logic, and it is no coincidence that some founders of analytic tradition (first of all Frege, Russell, and Carnap) were also prominent logicians. (But there were also authors and schools within early analytic philosophy whose researches were based on less formal tools such as classical logic and linguistic methods of analysis of language. Ordinary language philosophy is an example of this type of philosophy.) Using the new logic as a philosophical tool led to a huge number of new ideas and generated a new type of philosophical criticism that was implemented in a number of projects of ‘overcoming metaphysics’. These features constituted the methodological and thematic profile of early analytic philosophy. As opposed to the later, contemporary analytic philosophy cannot be characterized by a prevailing method or a set of main research topic. Its characteristic features are rather of historical, institutional, and stylistic nature. In the paper, early analytic philosophy is represented by Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap etc.), and ordinary language philosophy (later Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, and Searle). Contemporary analytic philosophy is represented by Quine, and direct reference theory in philosophy of language (Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan, and Putnam).

Alain

Alain (Emile Auguste Chartier) is a French philosopher and essayist, a representative of the existential personalist tendency in the philosophy of the twentieth century. Investigated the foundations of thinking from the standpoint of the reflective tradition. Developed a theory of judgment, considering the ability to judge as a special function of consciousness, allowing you to streamline knowledge about reality and make sense of the world. According to Alain, the main task of philosophy is not so much to know reality, but to teach a person the wisdom of life, to make him virtuous and happy. The leading themes of Alena's ethical concept are the substantiation of morality and freedom as the most important characteristics of a person's being. The philosopher defended the principle of autonomy of will and independence of decisions in the sphere of morality from empirical inclinations and utilitarian interests. Alain refuted the idea of the universality of moral norms, asserting the unique and creative nature of ethical values. He created an original teaching on soul therapy as a technique of inner self-control and the art of being happy.

Paul Ricoeur about Man

The article analyzes a wide range of philosophical and anthropological subjects in the works of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Rejecting the idea of system-creation, Ricoeur creates a generalized image of a person in the form of polemical, sometimes marginal notes in relation to other European thinkers. His works reveal an original view on the problems of human subjectivity, Ego, personality, selfness, identity, etc. The author of the article shows that all the variety of anthropological topics in Ricoeur can be clarified through the phenomenon of human subjectivity, which the philosopher connects with spirituality, which is born in pre-reflexive forms of life and culture. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the personality as an individuality of a special kind and to the process of identification of the person as an individual. P. Ricoeur managed to give a new interpretation to the concept of identity through a complex dialectic of internal and external self-identity.

Intercultural Philosophy

Intercultural philosophy emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Germany and Austria. It has become widespread throughout the world. Geopolitical changes, which defined the nature of modernity as an era of post-colonialism and globalization, played a decisive role in its emergence. The new philosophic trend has grown from a comparative philosophy that has gone through three stages of evolution: from proving the universal "truth" of Western philosophy, to attempts to create a "synthetic philosophy" and, finally, to the recognition of autonomy and significance of non-Western philosophies. Intercultural philosophy offers a new method of thinking, which involves the rejection of claims to the ultimate truth of the philosophical tradition of its own culture, respect for the heritage of other cultures, the deployment of large-scale discourse so that to find alternative approaches to solving both purely philosophical and global problems.

Merab Mamardashvili: the Author with His Voice and Act

The article analyses the approaches of outstanding Russian philosophers — V.A. Podoroga and S.A. Smirnov — to the philosophical works of Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili. Their two monographic studies, published in 2020, offer a perfectly unique view through the original authorial lenses of the philosophical ideas of M.K. Mamardashvili. Making special mention of the topological configuration of Mamardashvili’s thinking, his specific metaphoricalness, these authors, each in his own way, immerse the readers into the semantic space of his philosophy. V.A. Podoroga reveals the unique philosophical style of Mamardashvili built on free speech-thought in contrast to a written text, with its permanent desire to repeat what was said in order to receive a new impetus for the motion of thought, and with its invariable return to the starting point. S.A. Smirnov retraces Mamardashvili’s authorial act of utterance as an autobiographic one, restoring the navigation of the philosopher’s personality through his creation that appears as an organ-tool of understanding. The monographs are a significant contribution to comprehension of the Russian philosophical tradition of the 20th century.

The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Herbarium Philosophicum (prologue), Plato’s Plane Tree (chapter 1))

Michael Marder, a well-known specialist in environmental philosophy and political theory, studied at universities in Canada and the United States, received a Ph. D. from the New School of Social Research in New York, and taught at the Universities of Georgetown, Saskatchewan, and Washington. He conducted research at the University of Lisbon and served as an associate professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before becoming a research professor at the University of the Basque Country. M. Marder is a member of the editorial board of journal «Telos» (New York), as well as the editor of four book series: «Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy», «Critical Plant Studies», «Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics, and Cultural Studies» and «Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought». Michael Marder works in the phenomenological tradition of continental philosophy. He is the author of books «Grafts: Writings on Plants» (2016), «The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness» (2016), «Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics» (2018) и «Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation» (2020). Most of his philosophical works are focused on constructing a concept in which plants are viewed as beings with their own form of subjectivity. He is best known for the monograph «Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life» (2013). Marder's book «The Philosopher’s Plant (Intellectual Herbarium)» (2014), from which the prologue «Philosophical Herbarium» and the first chapter «Plato's Plane Tree» are taken for translation, is devoted to the relationship between philosophy and plants. The author believes that philosophy did not pay due attention to plants, and seeks to fill this gap. The book contains twelve stories, each of which relates a famous philosopher to a plant or flower (Plato’s Plane Tree, Avicenna’s Celery, Kant’s Tulip etc.), which, according to Marder, allows a deeper understanding of his philosophical ideas.