In article it is shown that the philosophical anthropology undergoes the radical conceptual shift caused by the tragic experience of the 20th century. The existential anthropology envisages a special type of communication in “boundary situations” (K. Jaspers) when people reveal themselves in their “authenticity” and the routine forms of adaptation to reality are depreciated. The “existential communication” demonstrates the essence of a person as the center of reasonable, healthy, and good will to life. However, the “philosophical belief” in such essence is called into question if the living conditions in a “boundary situation” go beyond the limits of humanity. The conditions of “terrestrial hell,” described by Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Stories, are of that kind. The experience of the Kolyma penal servitude, interpreted through Shalamov’s art perception, showed that the philosophical anthropology is false and trustless if its concepts are built on the base of apriorism or are brought to the sphere of the transcendental. The philosophical anthropology in Shalamov’s “camp prose” is not an abstract conceptual design but a part and continuation of a vital context, from which the vital destiny of the writer cannot be separated. In the ontological bases of this philosophy, there is no place for eternal and invariable “human essence,” elevating the personality to the top of being hierarchy. The “Kolyma hell” does not divide existence and essence of the personality and does not oppose them, it establishes between them a special connection. The essence reveals itself just when the hell devastates it. The essence meets the reality at the last boundary of resistance to hell. Shalamov’s anthropology places reflection on the personality inside a “boundary situation” but notabove it. If this experience is acquired, the philosophical anthropology will not be the same as before. The reality of terrestrial hell will be its touchstone.

The concept of Dionysianism becomes fundamental in the work of Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov in the 1900–1910s, which led him to development of an original theory of symbolism. For this poet and thinker, symbolism becomes an integral philosophy of art. Ivanov’s theory of symbolism incorporates aesthetics, ethics, theory of knowledge, philosophy of culture. The concept of Dionysianism formed in the process of Ivanov’s philological studies of Greek religion was marked by the influence of F. Nietzsche. However, under the influence of Russian religious and philosophical thought, Ivanov comes to conclusions that contradicted Nietzsche, concerning both philological and cultural-philosophical aspects of the origin of the tragedy. The present article discusses Ivanov’s perception of F. Nietzsche’s philosophy as well as points of divergence between Nietzsche and Ivanov in understanding the mythologem of Dionysus. Particular attention is paid to the theory of realistic symbolism, understood by Ivanov as a religious symbolism, with its focus on acquiring realia in rebus, which is, at its core, a noumenon. The article also discusses Ivanov’s ideas of convergence of the myth of Dionysus with the Christian religion, his interpretation of the cult of Dionysus as well as Ivanov’s main conclusions regarding the Dionysian cult and Christianity.

The article considers the views of Sergei Bulgakov on Russian literature in the light of his assessment of the religious views of Russian writers. Being philosopher and religious thinker, Bulgakov also often acted as a literary critic, paying attention not so much to selected works but to the worldview of the writers. S. Bulgakov shares vision that the faith is an integral element of all the main writers of Russian literature. This vision is largely due to the fate of Bulgakov himself, who returned to the bosom of Orthodoxy during this period. The philosopher reflects on the conflict between the artist and the religious personality, which is unfolding in the soul of a writer. Obviously, one can see here the echoes of Bulgakov’s personal experience. Speaking about national literature, Bulgakov emphasizes that the ethical in it dominates over the aesthetic, and literature’s main occupation is the formulation and solution of moral problems – an area that in the West was engaged in philosophy in the proper sense of the word. The primacy of ethics stems from the national features of the Russian man, fully inherent in writers who are accustomed to ask metaphysical questions. That is the cause of the attention paid by Russian writers to metaphysics. The Russian writers embedded their own spiritual quests into the speeches of the characters of their stories.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between right and law. The author identifies four types of understanding of right: positivist, natural-legal, general social, and the point of view of educational literature. These four types belong to different paradigms of understanding: the philosophical one (theory of natural right) and the legal one (three other points of view). The philosophy of right as a purely philosophical and not a legal discipline uses a philosophical approach to the substantiation of the essence of right. Its fundamental thesis: it is impossible to prove the claims of the right to general validity and obligation if we use the framework of jurisprudence only. In this regard, the statist positivism is subjected to sharp criticism as a theory that rejects the essential difference between right and law and identifies right and law with the activities of the state alone. In philosophy, the right is understood as a system of values that includes fundamental moral and legal ideas and principles. The difference between right and law, their necessary dualism lies in the difference in their genetic nature. The right consists mainly of values that are inherently regulative, whereas the law is a set of norms that have a constitutive essence. This distinction between values and norms and, therefore, between the regulative as such and the constitutive is precisely the philosophical basis for the distinction between right and law. The essence of the regulative as such is based on ontological attitudes of consciousness, which are a priori in their origin. The article concludes with a classification of the functions of right with regard to law.

The author discusses the thesis proposed by H. Hazlitt that jurisprudence has developed such methods and principles of solving legal problems that could also serve as a guide in solving ethical problems. The article critically reviews the reasoning behind this thesis made by H. Hazlitt and L. Yeager. A special attention is paid to the influence of J. Bentham’s utilitarian ideas on the formation of Hazlitt’s conception. Not being a lawyer, Hazlitt in the work The Foundations of Morality argued that the law affects morality. In Hazlitt’s ethical theory judicial precedents affect the formation of moral rules. Hazlitt compares the formation of general rules in the sphere of morality and law. Using the formula of evaluation of moral rules proposed by Hazlitt, situations should be considered from three positions: subject of action, object of action, and impartial observer. Even though Yeager develops the ideas of Hazlitt, the former uses different arguments to substantiate the main thesis. Yeager believes that the laws have to declare the norms of morality. However, the arguments of Hazlitt and Yeager should be considered critically, as some researchers have done. As an additional argument to support the article’s main thesis, it is proposed to use the mechanism of conciliation procedures as a model for solving ethical problems. The article concludes that the thesis proposed by Hazlitt is valid but requires further reasoning and research by the philosophers of law.

The proceedings of the Round Table on "Reason vs Post-Truth: Ontology, Axiology, Geopolitics" (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, November 21, 2018).

Authors of the proceedings:

V.V. Mironov (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences , D.Sc. in Philosophy, Professor)

K.K. Momdzhyan (Lomonosov Moscow State University, D.Sc. in Philosophy, Professor)

A.V. Belokobylskyi (Ukrainian Institute of Strategies of Global Development and Adaptation, D.Sc. in Philosophy, Professor)

A.P. Kozyrev (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Ph.D. in Philosophy)

O.A. Efremov (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate Professor)

M.V. Bratersky (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Ph.D. in Political Sciences, Professor)

A.V. Pilko (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Ph.D. in History)

V.S. Levytskyy (Ukrainian Institute of Strategies of Global Development and Adaptation, Ph.D. in Philosophy)

The author analyzes the differences between the two types of orientation activity of human mind. The purpose of orientation activity is the comprehension (cognition or awareness) of the present being that already exists in our world and doesn’t depend on a man. An alternative to orientation activity is the project activity of mind, the task of which is to construct what is not yet present in the world, but what should be in it for human life to be possible and comfortable. The author considers an important difference between a) the reflective orientation that cognizes the world in its own logic of existence, which is given to the subject of cognition forcibly and does not depend on its value preferences, and b) the valuative orientation that evaluates the world, correlating it with the needs and interests of people. The author believes that reflective orientation speaks in the language of the judgments of reflective truth, which are subject to verification that allows to distinguish objective truth from ignorance and misconceptions. The judgements of value can be universally significant and even mandatory, when the norms are embodied in legal and other acts as a prescribed way of thinking, feeling, andpracticalbehavior. However, neither the intersubjectivity of the judgments of value nor their obligatory nature are identical to their truthfulness. An opinion does not become true, even if it is the opinion of the majority, the illegal and punishable is not logically false, if it is made with the proper measure of awareness and understanding. Considering the dialectics of the co-existence of the “true” and “value” spheres of human life activity, the author defends the objective truth (but opposes its absolutizing, transformation into a substance of human spirit) and calls for a “civilized” (constructive, rather than pejorative) attitude to the judgments of truth. Only in this case, despite the variability of human ideas and the inability of man to know everything, we can defend the ability of our mind to reveal not an absolute and phenomenological but still objective truth.

The article examines the articulation and clarification of the concept of cultural ideology. According to the author’s position, both for describing of ideal “horizons” of social reality and for clarifying the cultural role of ontological beliefs associated with these horizons, the concept of cultural ideology is more successful than the previously used concepts of “garment of ideas” (Ideenkleid) “social representation,” “dominant worldview.” Unlike Heidegger’s concept of the essence of being that is ruling in history, the concept of cultural ideology claims to describe only the subjective attitudes of individuals, who, by a joint cultural activity, constitute an intersubjective space of meanings and actions. However, these attitudes form the foundations of cultural experience that determine the social structure and social being in each specific historical era. In our days, there are signs of the transformations of the foundations of the cultural ideology that originated in the age of Enlightenment and dominated in the society of Modern Times. The evidence of those transformations is a phenomenon of “post-truth.” The denial of the singularity of truth is an evidence of the crisis of the universal mind that is a justifying and legitimizing foundation of sciences and technologies. Moreover, the crisis of the cultural ideology of universal mind endangers not only the science itself but the entire social order (including its values, universal rights and freedoms) that was formed by the belief in the universality of mind.

The article analyzes the current crisis of the world-system, the evidences of which are apparent in various areas of social reality: science, politics, and religion. In this regard, the author argues that all these transformations are associated with a change in the cultural paradigm that can be described as a crisis of the universal mind. Belief in the universal mind, which founded the whole culture of the age of Modernity, is a subject to significant erosion today and it changes the entire landscape of social reality and the meaning of the social practices. Moreover, it affects the functioning of the entire worldsystem by changing cultural priorities themselves. In the past, the theory of modernization assumed a globalization process with the inclusion of all the subjects on the principles of the Western model, but today, due to the belief in the absence of universal truth, the world is segmented into cultural subworlds that are built around particular values and traditions. In our days, there are several civilizational projects (American, Russian, Islamic, Chinese) that are alternative to the classical project of Modernity, based on the the values of Enlightenment. In this regard, the current stage of globalization cannot be considered as the global expansion of the Western (Modernity) project, but there is a competition of civilizational subworlds, challenging the classical Western project. It is obvious that under such conditions the cultural proximity becomes a fundamental resource that allows competitive projects to expand their sphere of influence. When belief in the universal mind and in the existence of the Absolute Truth recedes into the past, it becomes impossible to appeal to universal norms and principles. Therefore, it only remains to appeal to own cultural traditions, putting efforts to make them as attractive as possible for both internal and external “consumers.” Thus, the cultural proximity, which due to the destruction of the universal mind suddenly became a geopolitical value, turns out to be not only a part of an individual’s cultural identity but also a tool for promoting civilizational projects.

On World Philosophy Day, November 15, 2018, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized the international conference on the Russian classic writer I.S. Turgenev (“Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev: A Philosophical Writer and Political Philosopher. On the 200th Anniversary of the Birth”). During the plenary and two breakout sessions, speeches were given by philosophers, cultural researchers, historians ofRussia,USA,Germany,Austria. The conference’s attitude to the consideration of the multifaceted heritage of the great Russian writer made it possible to highlight in the modern historical and cultural context many aspects of Turgenev’s work, to rethink stereotypes existing among researchers and in the mass consciousness regarding Turgenev. At the conference, Turgenev was presented as a political thinker, a liberal who embodied spiritual asceticism, a supporter of the dialogue of cultures, a “Russian European” who does not accept “new barbarism” in all its manifestations from radicalism to Russian exclusivity idea. In the reports and speeches, attention was drawn to the cultural bilingualism inherent in Turgenev, his ability of non-biased artistic and philosophical observation, which enabled him to analyze the then state of minds in Russian society, to foresee many collisions inherent in the national historical process in the 20th – early 21st centuries and world cultural trends engendered by the “uprising of the masses,” to anticipate the drama of the absurd. At the conference, among the discussed topics were the themes of nihilism and loneliness, viewed through the prism of the existential experience of the writer and world literary characters.