Blockchain as Res Publica: Towards a Political Genealogy of a Distributed Ledger

This paper focuses on the political genealogy of one of the most promising and influential IT technologies of our time: the blockchain (or distributed registry). We point at important commonalities between the principles of blockchain projects and models of republican governance. In contrast to techno-anarchist and democratic ideas, the republican genealogy of blockchain has so far failed to attract the attention of researchers. After examining the basic technical properties and ideological images of blockchain, we explore how the four main principles of classical republicanism (personal freedom and autonomy of the individual; civic virtues; common good; recognition of great causes) are realized in influential blockchain projects — Bitcoin (developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto) and Ethereum (developed by Vitalik Buterin). The functioning of blockchain nodes is supported by a community of miners, who are free, but at the same time agree to act for the development of a common thing. What the republic and the blockchain have in common is that it is impossible to have a community without cooperative action. At the same time, blockchain is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour's argument on the role of non-humans in social relations: his code seeks to replace untrustworthy humans with rule-acting nodes, and to create a cryptographic society where untrustworthy human relations are replaced by computers' relations. This article is an invitation to begin a discussion of the political ideas that are embedded in new technologies and the models of governance that are mobilized through them, often without proper reflection on the nature of such ideas by their creators.

Intellectual Virtue and the Epistemological Nature of Medical Evidence

This article examines the problem of defining the epistemological nature of evidence in modern medicine through its two interrelated aspects — bias in the collection of data in randomized controlled trials and personal bias of the physician — which form part of the general bias problem in various professional fields. This problem is widely discussed today in the medical community, in which there is no unanimity in understanding what grounds for making the correct clinical decision are considered decisive — randomized controlled trials or the doctor's own clinical experience. In this article, it is interpreted from the point of view of the modern epistemology of virtues, which makes it possible to raise the question of the doctor's responsibility not from the position of professional deontological morality, but from the point of view of intellectual virtue. The virtuous nature of the medical profession lies in the ability of the subject to make responsible clinical decisions in the course of the cognitive process and to find the optimal balance between standardized protocols for diagnosis, prevention and treatment and their own clinical experience, which makes an individualized approach to each individual medical history possible. A standardized approach requires the “grafting” of the hermeneutic experience expressed in a general theory of understanding and interpretation. Against the background of a decrease in the level of social trust in the medical community, the substantiation of individualizing standardization as a methodologically productive way of integrating various cognitive practices is intended to help overcome the limiting abstraction of the epistemological subject in the classical epistemology of medicine and to recognize the productive-heuristic role of the doctor as a subject of cognition.

Can Science be a Political Agent without a Race for Power?

The article is an attempt to answer the question on the political subjectivity of modern science. It is hardly possible to speak of the specific political subjectivity of science and scientists as a conscious participation in the struggle for power. First, the race for power itself is not a major purpose for them: scientists concentrate on studying the world and creating new technologies. Second, even if they participate in such a race, they are not different from other social groups which protect their interests in political process. Changing the point of view on the political subjectivity of science enables to see its specific position in the space of the political. During discipline power and biopower formation and governmentality development, science became a basic element of public administration and politics. It forms the ideas of the objects managed, possible ways of interaction with them and creates the space of the political and management decisions implemented. In this case, social sciences and humanities obtain special political subjectivity. This also applies in a specific way to natural science and technical sciences. New scientific theories and technological solutions become representatives of non-human actors in the human world. They result in changing our ideas on “Nature”, a “scene” for history and political actions. The emergence of new non-human actors can cause the technological revolution which can influence the ways of political action implementation and provide new opportunities to execute political projects. This is an important element of the political subjectivity of science.

“La Marque du Sacré”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy's Travel Log: Review of a Book by J.-P. Dupuy

Review of: Dupuy, J.-P. 2021. Znak svyashchennogo [La marque du sacré] [in Russian]. Trans. from the French by A. Zakharevich. Moskva [Moscow]: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye

Post-Normal Science: Passing the Scylla of Uncertainty and the Charybdis of the Politicization of Knowledge

The goal of the article to assess and comprehend the legitimacy, advantages, and disadvantages of the idea of “post-normal” and “citizen science”, the problem of treating science as a political actor, as well as the potential “democratization” of contemporary science. The nature and epistemological status of “post-normal” and “citizen” science, their place, and potential role in political decision-making in situations of significant uncertainty of the future (which is especially characteristic of ecology) discussed. We are prone to emphasize the importance of the traditional criteria of rationality, dominant among scientists working under the milieu of the norms and principles of “normal” science. Despite the transdisciplinary nature of the problems and the format of decision-making that are at the core of post-normal science. Nevertheless, the political subjectivity of modern science far from being full-fledged. Science does not participate in politics in an independent actor acting on the same plane and on a par with other political actors (parties or other political structures). The acquisition by the science of the status of a political subject or the loss of such largely depends on the nature of the political climate of the society. Political subjectivity is an imitative political atmosphere that cannot be the immediate goal and value of science. Aspiration for political subjectivity as a norm for post-normal science implies a radical change in its “self-consciousness”, socio-cultural status, and thus, increasing its political weight. However, this aspiration has any reasonable theoretical and practical sense only as an integral part of the movement towards true civil society and democracy.

Discourse of Historical Cognition: an Epistemological Analysis

The purpose of this article is to consider the discourse of researchers actively working in the field of historical knowledge. In other words, the article examines the features of the verbalization of basic concepts and methodological attitudes of modern historical knowledge. Discourse analysis, in contrast to the traditional philosophical and methodological, allows you to penetrate into the microcosm of historical work, to observe the “historian at the workbench” outside the “spotlights” and other attributes of public demonstration. Discourse analysis is a specific section of historical epistemology. From the author's point of view, epistemology adheres to a descriptive attitude. It is intended to describe, not prescribe, as is the case with the methodology of science. The goal of the article is to trace and show the dynamics of the historical vocabulary in the hope of seeing emerging trends in the rethinking of the models of the historical process as a whole. Discourse analysis allows you to detail intellectual changes and see “point shifts” in patterns of thinking, which ultimately lead to “tectonic transformations” of the entire field of historical research. Science, according to the theory of P. Bourdieu, is a specific social game, and contains a competitive struggle within itself, in which the winner acquires the right to general recognition and authority, which consolidate the concepts he invented as legitimate. History is no exception here. The article focuses on such concepts that have gained legitimacy as “historical reconstruction”, “temporality”, “past”, “presentism”, “antiquarianism”, “narrative”, “contingent”. It is shown that words are the triggers of search thinking.

Petrus Thomae — an Early Follower of Duns Scotus, Minorite from Barcelona and Author of Metaphysical Treatises

The article serves as a historical-philosophical introduction to the Russian translation of the Latin text of the 11th question of the metaphysical treatise of Peter Thomae, OFM “De modis distinctionum” (written around 1325). We present therein the biography of this Franciscan theologian and philosopher from Barcelona, list and briefly characterize all his works that have come down to us (together with their respective editions). The article also shows why the metaphysical legacy of this early follower of John Duns Scotus is of particular importance. Then we outline and characterize the general structure of the whole treatise and of the quaestio to which the text we publish belongs. In conclusion, we describe the type of the Latin original that served as the basis for our translation, namely the collated text of three manuscripts from the 14th century and of one from the 15th century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Separation of Powers in Federal Polity and “Wills of Nation”

The problem of this article is built around the tension between the concept of organ sovereignty and democracy theory. First of all, this vision of sovereignty fails to describe the diverse forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. It speaks very sparingly of the people as a political actor. Moreover, the concept of organ sovereignty does not provide the theoretical resources to describe the intermediary bodies in the space between the state and the individual. The tradition of liberal democracy emphasises the importance of such bodies for maintaining popular control over state. Also, the idea of organ sovereignty, by reducing all power to a single legislature, ignores the demand for self-government coming from communities located within the same state and yet united by a certain collective identity. Today, democracy theorists are turning to the concepts of federalism in order to overcome the above-mentioned limitations set by the concept of organ sovereignty. So far, however, the concepts of federalism have not been very convincing in describing the various forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. Above all, they have failed to consistently justify the existence of multiple decision-making centres within a single polity. The article argues that the model of the federal polity proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his later work “Considerations on the mode of government in Poland” explains how within one polity multiple centres of collective decision-making can coexist. The model also provides an understanding of how citizen participation in multiple decision-making centres can be organised.