The idea of sociability - a person’s disposition and ability to communicate and live in the community - goes through the whole history of philosophy. Due to the peculiarity of translations, this term and the whole tradition related to it have been lost to the Russian reader. The article discusses some tendencies in comprehending the idea of sociability in early modern moral philosophy. The key to this consideration is F. Hutcheson’s essay On the Natural Sociability of Mankind, the title of which contains the very term “sociability” and which presents the main essential points in a discussion of the issue in the first third of the 18^th century. One can distinguish two main approaches to the problem. According to one of them, sociability determined by various human natural needs is the basis of social relations, and a person becomes a moral agent as a social being (H. Grotius, T. Hobbes, S. Pufen-dorf, B. Mandeville). According to another approach, sociability is a manifestation of a person’s natural tendency to care for the good of others, and its consistent implementation leads to the formation of community and supports its stability (Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, J. Butler, D. Hume, A. Smith). Representatives of both approaches recognized contradiction in manifestations of sociability or in its nature. I. Kant theoretically overcame the confrontation between these approaches and conceptualized the contradiction and associated it with the human nature. According to Kant, the “unsociable sociability” is given in the fact that a person has a tendency to sociability but also a tendency to self-assertion at the expense of others. However, despite the presence of asocial features (evil principle), Kant considered the person’s inherent sociability (good principle) as a prerequisite for culture and as one of the most important conditions of possibility of morality.

This article discusses the internal theoretical problems of the discourse of moral universality, which are causing its external criticism. In particular we reconstruct the difficulties faced by the discourse of universality when it tries to reconcile the ideas of law and action. At the first stage, we reveal the reason why the tragic choice becomes a “stubborn fact” of the discourse of universality. It turns out to be a formal interpretation of the idea of universality, which is based on the presumption of the identity between the being of action ad the thinking about action. Since the possibility of an action and, as a consequence, the possibility of morality, is based on the non-identity of being and thinking, “universality in morality” is assessed as a contradictio in adjecto. At the second stage, we propose an alternative interpretation of the idea of moral universality, based on the divergence of metaphysical identity. At the third stage, we demonstrate that the source of criticism of the idea of moral universality is the confusion of two interpretations of universality and the substitution of a substantial interpretation by a formal one. At the fourth stage, we carry out a synthesis of formal and substantial interpretations of moral universality, including its meaningful normative concretization. We conclude that the source of criticism of the idea of moral universality is the conjugation of universality and objectivity (regarded as a main principle of the Modern Age thought). Universality retains its status as a substantial feauture of the concept of morality, like the status of the moral absolutivity (“voice of conscience”) in ethical theory.

The article analyzes the intellectual experience of a historian of philosophy. This experience is formed by the ideological and the political factors that lays beyond the realm of the philosophy. The author demonstrates how nonphilosophical factors influence both philosophy itself and the activity of the historian of philosophy. If, since the Greek ancient epoch, the basis of the philosophy is the faith in the universal laws of the nature and their intelligible character, then the historian of philosophy relies on the faith into the intelligible laws of the development of the thought, derived from the historicism, which is a part of the ideological corpus of the Western Enlightenment. The history of philosophy in the modern state is a space where the activity of the historian of philosophy, emulating epistemological anarchism, in reality covers its bias by the political paradigm of Western civilization. As a result, the history of philosophy turns out to be a sphere of unfolding specific political and ideological programs, and the experience of the historian of philosophy is not only professional but also political work. This personal experience by its nature is decisive for the formation of the image of philosophy and the picture of its historical development. The author suggests to qualify the history of philosophy as a register of knowledge in which the central concepts and definitions should be constantly renewed. In the conclusion, the author proposes to acknowledge that the historian of philosophy, working with the corpus of philosophical texts and ideas, has far greater degree of creative freedom than it is traditionally assumed.

The paper examines the axiological aspect of historical-philosophical research. It is important to demonstrate that this issue was widely discussed at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, and, therefore, a certain axiological aspect in historical-philosophical investigations was elaborated and interpreted. To solve this issue, we turn to the question of what are the scientific premises of historical-philosophical work and whether they form the necessary foundation to acknowledge the scientific status of the history of thought. In our opinion, it is history of philosophy that provides the scholars with factual set of notions, and so it forms this field of research as a definite (or strict) science. We consider fruitful to analyze historical responds to the challenge of scientific status of philosophy and its history as well as to compare the history of philosophy and anthropology. In our opinion, many peculiarities of anthropological investigations are also quite typical for the historical-philosophical work, and such comparison enlarges the scientific perspective of philosophy as a human cognitive practice. A historian of philosophy cannot ignore ontological foundations of different cultures in his research since it is the source of his ability to adequately interpret the subject-matter of his research. Like ethnographers, the historians of philosophy reveal the meanings and distinguish the attitudes that various thinkers, being the representatives of their own culture and epoch, had taken into consideration.

The article discusses the significance and comprehension of freedom in the rapidly changing contemporary world. Unprecedented degree of individual independence and personal autonomy has been achieved, but this fact does not exclude the striving and search for the ways to gain freedom. The author presents the approaches defining a free subject as an effectively acting individuality, as a personality who surveys social practices and resists the dominant discourse, as a hyper consumer. Analyzing the concept of free subject, it is possible to reveal a tendency indicating that the achievement of independence and autonomy of an individual leads to the emergence of various kinds of contradictions, which become the basis for the emergence of new forms of dependence. The feature of modern forms of dependence is that with an unprecedented degree of individual freedom, new difficulties arise in finding their own identity. The problems of personal self-discovery, individual development are still relevant. The inaccessibility of freedom is considered as the basis for its presence since the search and striving for freedom constantly requires individual efforts contributing to the revitalization of unique forms of being. Other modes of consciousness are considered in the process of researching M. Bakhtin’s doctrine on “participatory consciousness” and K.J. Wojtyla’s teaching, which presumes that the consciousness of actions is not related to the processes of cognition, but it is expressed in the opportunity to feel himself the cause of action, to experience the authorship of this type of activity. Freedom as a way of the implementation of the being is expressed in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “sense-event.” Thus, freedom serves as the basis for everything that may happen, starts a new series of events, develops new rules, and, at the same time, is constantly adjusted in the process of personal efforts.

The problem of freedom is researched in various ways by the religions of the world, by the scientific theories and by the mythological consciousness of people. The article pays great attention to the myth and its influence on the realm of freedom and on our interpretation of reality. The author understands a myth as a certain free fiction of a man in order to interpret reality in his own way and sometimes to create his own artistic image of the world. Often the myth stimulates the ability of the imagination and thus it participates in the creation and existence of personality. It is argued that the traces of the myth can be found in most ways of orientation in the material and ideal worlds as well as in the systems of human interests and relationships, in the original human desire of freedom. The problem of freedom is central to all human history. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, political freedoms - one can name a large number of different freedoms, but the freedom of creativity should be considered as principal freedom. It should be noted also the freedom of thought, which can lead a cognizing person beyond the worlds of substances and energies, to the place where the Eternal Creator should abide. As the world religions believe, we inherit the capacity for creativity and self-knowledge from God. The very same creative freedom exists historically. Freedom of thought is accompanied by spontaneity and mystery. Spontaneity of consciousness and freedom of creativity create a system of meanings that determine the course of human history, while history is perceived by an observer as a completely unique, cognizable phenomenon.

This paper aims to reveal the structural problem of libertarian accounts of free will. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, I formulate the main principles of libertarian accounts from the perspective of their values. I argue that there are two main understandings of autonomy that motivate libertarian project: causal-autonomy and substance-autonomy. Causal-autonomy refers to independency from the factors that are beyond the control of the agent. Substance-autonomy concerns the existence of the substance of self, which is self-sufficient and exercises control over a person’s behavior. I show that different strands of metaphysical libertarianism could be understood within the context of this distinction. Agent-causal theories emphasize the value of substance-autonomy as a necessary condition for causal-autonomy. Event-causal libertarianism considers causal-autonomy to be sufficient for genuine freedom of will. In the second part, I discuss different formulations of the problem of luck. I show the respective advantages of compatibilist position in the context of the problem of luck and sketch the main strategies of libertarian responses to this problem. Four versions of the problem of luck are discussed: rollback argument, promise argument, the problem of contrastive explanation of action and Hume’s statement of the problem of luck. In the third part, I develop Hume’s criticism of libertarianism making this criticism independent from Hume’s denial of the possibility of causal indeterminism. I argue that causal account of action both in event-causal theories and in agent-causal theories leads to contradictory intuitions about agent’s responsibility in indeterministic universe. My argument purports to show that attributions of moral responsibility for indetermined actions are not grounded because person is intuitively both responsible and not responsible for these actions.

This is the first article in the series that examines the circumstances of the stay of the Russian philosopher Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1793-1856), whose 225^th anniversary is celebrated in 2019, in Italy in December 1824 -August 1825. Leaving Russia in the summer of 1823, Chaadaev initially did not plan to visit the Italian states, limiting himself to Germany, England, France and possibly Switzerland. However, during the voyage it was Italy that became the central and most important stage of Chaadayev’s European journey. According to the author, it was there that Chaadaev formed the main provisions of the original historiosophical concept, which were then set out in the Philosophical Letters in the second half of the 1820s. This article focuses on Chaadaev’s stay in Milan and Florence. The author analyzes the circumstances of Chaadaev’s visit to the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie, where he had the opportunity to see Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper, which first was subjected to vandalism by the French soldiers who had seized Milan and then became the object of unsuccessful attempts of restoration already in the years of Austrian rule. In the analysis of the Florentine stage of Chaadaev’s journey, special attention is paid to his meetings with Russian diplomats at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, with readers of the unique for the then Europe scientific and educational center Gabinetto scientifico letterario G.P. Vieusseux (later its visitors will be Stankevitch, Chicherin, Herzen, Bakunin, Dostoevsky), and - most importantly - with the English Protestant missionary Charles Cook (January 1825), which became, according to the Chaadayev, “decisive meeting” of his life.

Encyclopedia article. The article offers a philosophical and sociological analysis of the concept of power. The author starts from an intuitively reliable definition, according to which power is an asymmetric and stable social relation. Characterization of power as a relation dismisses its substantial definition as a quality, ability or force. The substantial definition turns out to be ineffective in the theoretical perspective because power implies correlation of forces and not simply force. The relation between two agents does not fully describes the power relation since one of the parties is usually backed by superior resources. This fact indicates a stable asymmetry inherent in power. However, this asymmetry is not absolute in its nature: power as a social relation persists only if subordinate party has a relative freedom of action. Thus, the time horizon of power is established: the asymmetry of forces during a power struggle turns into asymmetry during the end of this struggle, which forms, in case of preservation and consolidation of second asymmetry, a third asymmetry that is stable power. The spatial horizon of power is formed not by the bodies of agents but by actions, which are expected within the framework of the relationship. These actions in their turn presuppose motivations. As the social differentiation grows and the communication network becomes more complicated, it would be difficult to understand the motivations of the parties. We might treat the concept of power in many alternative ways: either as a necessary component of social life or as disguised coercion; either as a universal or a specific relation; either as a purely individual relation or as a feature of the relations of different communities; either as an effect achieved in spite of resistance or as an opportunity to achieve an effect enhanced by solidarity. The article concludes with a brief overview of contemporary definitions of power, provided by social theory (M. Weber’s classical definition, post-Parsonian concepts of power by R. Dahl, M. Mann, N. Luhmann and S. Lukes) and political philosophy (H. Arendt).