The Russian higher education reform is ripe and overripe a long time. It is conducted primarily as optimization for purely economic criteria. This work contains a sketch of the actions that are able to adjust the conversion in connection with the orientation of the universities to the real labor market. This adjustment includes a number of significant steps towards the creation of a deep social partnership of government, business and academic communities.

The article reveals the features of forming of educational space in modern conditions, characterized as the era of postmodern and postindustrial society. Undertaken an interdisciplinary analysis comparing three position «the place, time, conditions», allows to draw conclusions about the state of the modern educational space, the positive and negative factors influencing it and the ways to overcome contradictions.

The article is devoted to one of the aspects of the modern symbolic politics - to the social design of space by means of its mythologizing. The author proves that according to the theoretical basis of the social myth brand and branding embody a new technology of myth design. In addition, place branding represents a type of symbolic design of space, which provides integration and preservation of collective historic memory through the creation of close ties between the past, the present and the future.

Local communities have a major role in constructing a tourist attraction by participating in various - direct and indirect - construction practices, especially in the resource-poor rural environment. The authors analyse the practices of consolidating local communities, realized through their involvement into the informational promotion of tourist attractions; organization of measures to improve urban territories and tourist attractions; their involvement into constructing tourist services, based on the revision of local historical heritage, different individuals, including a specific part of them - the enthusiasts.

The article analyzes the institute of capitals at functional as well as symbolic levels. In this approach the capital not only serves as a place to dispose the governmental bodies, but also takes over the functions of representation of the nation to itself and to the environment. Capitals are the idealized images of nation and national history, a sort of nation in miniature. That should verify the assumption that an additional mechanism of nation-building exists and is demonstrated by the creation of an ideal national image as opposing to peripheral marginality.

The article describes the problems of forming local identity in city communities, examines the role of local analytical communities in Russian cities. Based on social research, it presents the structure and the main elements of local identity. Conclusion is that the task of a local community is to provide the efficient transfer of symbolic politics to non-symbolic practices, that is, the transition from the struggle for identity in the symbolic space to political action.

The paper discusses Jaspers’ philosophy as an innovative approach which is radically different from the classical tradition. The main characteristics of this approach are dynamism, resignation of the system in favor of systematic thinking, understanding of philosophy as a practice of thought, rooted in a particular historical situation. Author presents the conceptual analysis of Jaspers’ ideas, clarifies his understanding of basic philosophical fields: ontology and epistemology, history of philosophy.

This article explores the Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophy of culture on the material of his earlier theoretical works. Of particular interest among those are his neoclassical articles belonging to the period of special enthusiasm for the antiquity, in which he criticizes the contemporary culture as fragmented and concentrated not on the universal or eternal values, but on the particular and “interesting” ones. His criticism is found here cunning and pretty relevant today. However a few years later in the articles of the Romantic period the same features of modernity which he criticized before become the basis on which Schlegel assumes to build a prosperous future culture. Does this inconsistency prove the inexperience of the young author, or the specific feature of young romantics’ culturological approach - that is of particular interest in this study.

This article is dedicated to understanding the philosophy of yoga, one of the six systems of classical Indian philosophy, done by Russian visionary philosopher of the Silver Age, mystic P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947). Questions at issue are possibilities and ways of interaction between various schools of thought, such as yoga mysticism, Russian, West-European and American philosophy and psychology.