The Paradoxes of Religious Consciousness: Leo Tolstoy in the Philosophical Criticism of Nicholai Berdyaev

The article is devoted to the analysis of N.A. Berdyaev’s perception of L.N. Tol­stoy’s work. Berdyaev’s philosophical criticism of the writer requires close at­tention and research because it allows us to formulate the most important ques­tion about philosophical vocabulary of Russian religious thinker. The essay examines not only Berdyaev’s critical interpretation of Tolstoy in its movement, but also the personal perception by the philosopher of Tolstoy as a great Russian writer. This paper explores the evolution of Berdyaev’s views on the problem of religious consciousness of Leo Tolstoy. I reveal the structural elements of Berdyaev’s personalistic metaphysics and analyze the main ideas of his eschato­logical ethics from the perspective of philosophical criticism of Tolstoy. I con­sider the modus of Berdyaev’s assessment of Tolstoy’s nihilism and discuss the ambiguity and complexity of Berdyaev’s attitude to the writer and religious thinker. This problem manifested itself, on the one hand, in Berdyaev’s identify­ing himself as a Russian thinker and a heir to the tradition of Solovyov, Dosto­evsky and Tolstoy, on the other hand, in sharp criticism of Tolstoy for his role in the crisis of Russian religious consciousness, which had irreversible conse­quences for the Russian state and society. This analysis proposes a new opinion on philosophical criticism of Berdyaev, as distinct from the traditional version, and introduces the thesaurus research strategy on Berdyaev’s religious philosophy.

Traditional Motives in the Aesthetic Views of the 20th Century Japanese PhilosophersKuki Shuzo, Karaki Junzo, Kato Shinro

The article is devoted to the views of three Japanese philosophers of the 20th cen­tury with their example we are convinced the relevance of the traditional world­view in contemporary Japan. Since the Meiji period, Western philosophy and aes­thetic theories have constantly influenced the views of Japanese thinkers, but up to this day, traditionalism plays an important role in Japanese thought. This also applies to the emphasis on corporality, human incarnation – the Buddhist position on “the unity of flesh and mind” (shin-jin – itchinyo) and the uncertainty fluidity of all forms of existence of things (mujo), relations, the ephemerality of life itself. This is also true for acceptance of Nothingness (mu) as a metacategory of philoso­phy which Nishida Kitaro put at the foundation of his system, explaining the his­torical world and the position in it of a person through the identity of absolute contradictions resolved in the field (basho) of Nothingness. This philosophical position, Buddhist-Taoist in essence, is especially vividly present in the works of Japanese thinkers who study the traditional culture of their homeland and try to give a modern interpretation to its categories.

The ideologist Yu.N. Govorukha-Otrok and the philosopher N.Ya. Grot: polemics of 1890–1891

The article analyzes a little-known episode in the history of Russian philoso­phy – the polemic of the editor of the journal “Questions of Philosophy and Psy­chology” N.Ya. Grot and the outstanding publicist of the conservative newspaper “Moskovskie Vedomosti” Yu.N. Govorukha-a boy who spoke under the pseudo­nym Yu. Nikolaev. The controversy took place in the first year of the magazine’s existence, when the principle and direction of the editorial policy were deter­mined. Yu.N. Govorukha-Otrok, sharing together with N.Ya. Grotto hope that the journal will lead to the formation of Russian national philosophy, insisted on the conscious circulation of the publication to the Slavophile tradition, defining the end goal of philosophical search for the creation of the Orthodox meta­physics meet the needs of aboriginal people's lives. His opponent, N.Ya. Grot, was a typical representative of the liberalism of the 80s of the XIX century, which was undecided in its socio-political preferences. Being a neophyte of meta­physics, the editor of “Questions” proceeded from an understanding of the ratio­nal nature of philosophical knowledge and justified the variety of directions of philosophical searches. He gave the pages of his magazine to the positivist authors from the liberal populist camp, which was completely unacceptable to his opponent. Thus, the circumstances of public life complicated the nature of the polemic on the issues of theoretical content and introduced social-evaluative judgments into it. Talker-Boy considered the polemic as an episode of the world-historical struggle of Christianity with the eudaemonistic idea of progress. The article claims that the subsequent development of Russian philosophy in the early twentieth century confirmed the correctness of the editorial line of the journal.

The Problem of Personality in Sapiozoi

Article discusses the problem of personality in the coming era of Sapiozoic. In geochronology, the quaternary period (from 2.6 million years ago to the present) is called the epoch that gave rise to man (anthropogen). In the Holocene epoch (the last 12-thousand-year period), human economic activity is visible. At the same time, the planet’s ecosystems were in balance. Discussions are underway about the geologically transitional Anthropocene – the epoch of hu­man activity as a global factor in the evolution of the Earth’s ecosystems. During the last 200–250 years, the co-evolution of man, society and nature has been on the path of the formation of techno-natural systems. Since the 1950s and 1960s the era of “Great Acceleration” begins. Consumer society, unrestrained mining, the course of technologization, the loss of the meaning of life led to chaos on a planetary scale. Many natural scientists pointed out the anthropogenic factors of the new geological epoch. The parameters (and language of descrip­tion) of the Anthropocene that are put forward in the discussions are limited by the methodologies of specific disciplines. The philosophical-integrative approach to the problem is relevant. It is worth paying attention to non-Western philosoph­ical teachings about large cycles of planetary development. In part, they resem­ble the scientific models. The acceleration of planetary development and the new large-scale cycle are discussed in the Roerichs philosophy. Purification by the global crisis should lead to the disclosure of the spiritual potential of a person, the construction of a world community. In one scenario, the coming era of sus­tainable development is called “sapiozoi” – “intelligent life” (D. Grinspoon). Its essence is associated with the management of planetary processes. Geosocio­engineering projects in the cognitive aspect involve fundamental transformations of human consciousness as an active worker, the formation of planetary forms of collective cooperation. The strategic task of managing the Earth’s ecosystems re­quires the formation of cosmo-geo-bio-socio-human-dimensional thinking, noo­spheric ethics and noospheric culture. The problem of the mind and the inner na­ture of man becomes the key to overcoming the global crisis.

Progress in Science and its Enemies: the Case of Academic Bullshit

The paper discusses the phenomenon of bullshit in the academia as an ob­stacle for progress in natural sciences and the humanities and as a problem of episte­mology and philosophy of science. The authors criticize a popular approach according to which bullshit is defined in terms of the goals or motivations of the bullshitter as a subjectivist and inadequate. Focusing on the phenomenon of bullshit in academic practices, the authors define it in terms of the relevance of the content of a corre­sponding discourse to the topical issues of a given academic discipline and the extent to which the justification proposed in the discourse meets the standard justification criteria in the given discipline. An important component of the proposed definition is the contextual parameter of the judge the perspective of which is represented by a relevant research community. The authors show how the proposed account captures the well-known cases of bullshit as well as solves some of the current problems in social epistemology, such as the nature of group bullshit. The authors argue that the problem of group bullshit arises only when bullshit is understood in terms of indi­vidual intentions or motives. In that case, it is challenging to define group bullshit in a case when no representative of a given group individually supports the bullshit argument put forward by the whole group. For an approach that defines bullshit without appeal to such subjective factors as individual intentions, this problem does not arise because bullshit is independent of the goals of the bullshitter. The authors acknowledge the importance of the motivations of the bullshiter and her strategies. However, they argue that this matter is irrelevant for the definition of bullshit.

The Principle of Self-Determination of Peoples High and Low

The subject matter of this article is the principle of Self-Determination of Peo­ples of the contemporary international law. The principle is scrutinized both his­torically through its inner historical transformation and logically, through the analysis of its inner normative logic. The problem related to this principle is that it belongs simultaneously to three realms, those of politics, law and morals, containing different meanings. These meanings often do contradict each other and it happens differently on different stages of the historical transformation. The three major stages of the development of the principle (from the First World War up to the end of the Second; from the end of the Second World war up to the demise of the Soviet Union; and from the demise of the Soviet Union up to now) were continuously the stages of predominantly political, legal and moral. Each of the stages was reflecting the characteristic illusion of its time and was founded on the unique combination of the dominant meanings of the principle, which was enabling the principle to play its practical role. At the same time there are clear indications that the principle is incapable to play its cardinal proper role of the universal moral principle when it comes to it. This becomes crystal clear at the third stage of the development and which is trigger­ing unprecedented political violence of the contemporary movements of self-determination and secession

Digital Technologies: Reality and Centaurs of Imagination

The article combines historical, cultural and systematic approaches to the analysis of digital transformations of society and man. Digital technologies play a crucial role in the transformation of economy, politics and society at the new stage of technologization. Developments and strategic projects for the introduction of arti­ficial intelligence, robotics, augmented and hybrid realities are implemented not only in the areas of dangerous, labor-intensive and routine work (i.e. in military affairs, industry, financial and economic operations), but also in the intellectual and creative spheres. The global time of change requires a global-system analysis. The invention of high information technologies and the interest of big business in the one-sided technologization of society disrupted the balanced co-evolution of computer technology and society. The author offers a noo-eco-geosystem ap­proach to the analysis of the crisis of technogenic civilization and the search for ways out of it. The complex grid of coordinates of the analysis includes planetary-physical, geo-ecological, geopolitical, geo-economical, geo-social, national socio-cultural, ethical and anthropological dimensions. The noo-eco-geosystem ap­proach makes it possible to reveal the catastrophic risks of digital economy and society strategies. The author considers energy and information and communica­tion technologies as catalysts for the accelerated transformation of society and the individual. These catalysts allow us to identify both the negative and positive as­pects of the global processes of evolution, as well as the “positive in the nega­tive”. The system analysis of digital transformations of society and man assumes consideration of methodological aspects of opportunities and limitations of tech­nologies. The destructive and purifying character of the transformations of nature and society is considered as a self-organizing process of the formation of the global world order, the future picture of the world and the qualitative transforma­tions of the mind on the basis of the values of noospheric ethics and geosociality