The article provides the general opinion of philosophers, scientists, and engineers heading institutes and centers of Samara National Research University regarding the issues of scientific and technological progress, social management problems under the condition of digital reality, human functions in new artificial environments. The technology is classically understood as satisfaction of human needs through the ability to apply knowledge of the laws of universe or nature in the broad sense. With advances in technology, the artificial human environment, the metacosmos, emerges. It is formed by technologies: by energy conversion machines, information processing machines, and presently by artificial intelligence. The evolution of the artificial environment, caused by scientific and technological development, entails social transformations, changes in the goals and methods of management system in human communities. Nowadays, the accumulated amount of contradictions of the information society testifies to the need of the search for a new form of organization of social structure, for new goals that would include human development, its creative potential growth, increase of the role of man in scientific and technological development. The authors discuss what the artificial intelligence technologies creating a new artificial human environment should be like to meet those goals. The article analyzes the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the transformation of society. The question is raised from what philosophical positions one should understand man, society, technology, social development, and its goals. Analyzing the fundament for the philosophy of technology concepts of human, space, evolution, technology, artificial nature, the principles of the society 5.0 are introduced, which were formulated by Noritsugu Uemura. The authors conclude that the development of the artificial intelligence technologies provides opportunities for consistent unlocking the human potential, for advancement in personal growth, and finally for overcoming the crisis of the imbalance between the technological and the human, which characterizes contemporary information society.

The article discusses the issue of the relationship between ontology and theory of knowledge in the works of Samara philosophers of the late Soviet period. The purpose of the study is to identify the local specifics of Samara philosophical thought by revealing the system-forming significance of the problem of the conditional unity of being and thinking at the level of a distinctive separation between ontological premises and epistemological prospects of methodological reflection in scientific knowledge. The objectives of the article are (1) to establish the characteristic features of the views of Samara philosophers on the general methodological significance of the problem of the relationship between ontology and the theory of knowledge, (2) to demonstrate the methodological relevance of their theoretical principles in the context of the philosophy of science, (3) to substantiate the applicability of the latter for the activity approach to the social interpretation of theoretical results. In the course of the study, the author uses the method of distinctions, formed in onto-epistemology by M.A. Lifshitz, methods of functional analysis, diachronic reconstruction and rationing of the worldview legitimation of a particular subject theoretical entity. Thus, the article reveals the local specificity of the Samara philosophy of the era of developed socialism. The author analyzes the program for optimizing scientific knowledge based on the Borisov–Dukhanin methodology, tied to the materialistic solution of the “main question of philosophy” (i.e., the issue of the relationship of the being and consciousness). The article pays attention to the theory of the style of scientific thinking, proposed by V.T. Salosin, to the methodological foundations and reception of the socio-philosophical theory of M.S. Kvetnoy. The author examines the productivity of the Samara precedent of the interaction of worldview and methodological aspects in philosophy. The article concludes that the specificity of the Samara philosophers’ solution of the problem of the unity of being and thinking on the basis of the Marxist understanding of the the main question of philosophy lies in the fact that it is considered as a methodological problem of achieving logical consistency to express the balance between ontological premises and epistemological perspectives.

The article discusses the works of Samara researchers T.N. Sosnina and L.B. Chetyrova in the field of the philosophy of labor. The analysis is carried out in the context of the need to resolve the socio-epistemological situation of the “death of labor” and to rethink the content of the concept of labor. T.N. Sosnina opened this thematic field of research in Samara in the 1970s with the development of philosophical theory of the subject of labor. As a result, the proper activity of the subject of labor was explained, the subject of labor in the system of spiritual production was singled out, and the prospect of a broad interpretation of labor activity that would include spiritual and managerial components was outlined. Methodological potential of the theory of the subject of labor was further used in the framework of noosphere paradigm approach for the analysis of material production flows and life cycles of the formation of products of nature and society. Taking into account the activity of means and subjects of labor, T.N. Sosnina presented the picture of the world as a universal cooperation. L.B. Chetyrova, discussing historical and cultural panorama of conceptions of labor, interpreted labor as a spiritual and practical activity. Obvious diversity of spiritual culture of the society naturally determines plurality of labor interpretations. Of particular interest is the analysis of the labor concept from the position of linguoconceptology as well as from the prospect of the images of labor in the history of mythology, religion, philosophy, and other worldviews. The Samara philosophy has answered the intellectual challenge of the concept the “death of labor,” proposing pan-ergonism – a worldwiew asserting the totality of labor. This worldview ontologizes the concept of the “labor of the being” and continues the tradition of ergodicy, various versions of which were developed by thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture.

The article examines the metaphilosophical conception of Galina Koryavko (1944–2018), doctor of philosophy, professor, an outstanding scholar and teacher, who worked in Samara in the 1990s. Those years were difficult not only for the country but also for Russian philosophy, it was caused by a radical revision of the attitude to Marxist philosophy, which in the Soviet period was considered as the only true philosophical teaching, whereas in the post-Soviet period, Marxism was mostly passed over in silence. This circumstance initiated the search for new, often very far from Marxism, interpretations of the meaning of philosophical activity, the nature of philosophy, its place in the intellectual culture of modern Russia. The practical significance of such studies was determined, first of all, by the fact that under the new conditions it was necessary, in a short time, to qualitatively restructure the teaching of philosophy courses in Russian universities. The metaphilosophical conception of G.E. Koryavko, developed in the late 1980s, was based, like the vast majority of philosophical works of that time, on the Marxist philosophical paradigm, which, in the spiritual atmosphere that has developed in Russia over the past 30 years, expectedly led this conception to almost complete oblivion. This study identifies the strengths of G.E. Koryavko’s interpretation of philosophy and also identifies the controversial points inherent in that interpretation. The goal of the article to reconsider G.E. Koryavko’s conception in order to indicate the directions of strengthening and modernization, to carry out its new reading. The article’s author comes to the conclusion that this conception represented one of the significant and timely attempts to comprehend the conceptual prerequisites of the crisis of public consciousness in the USSR in the 1980s, which implied a a demand for significant modernization of Soviet Marxism, taking into account the latest scientific achievements for that time, the entry of mankind into the post-industrial and information era. Unfortunately, the author of the conception failed to dialectically reconstruct the interpretation of ideology as “false consciousness” (F. Engels), as well as to substantiate the fundamental need for the presence of qualitatively different forms of false consciousness in any historical types of civilizations.

The article formulates the main issues that form the research field of the anthropology of sacrifice. The first group of problems is associated with a description of the fundamental anthropological nature of the phenomenon of sacrifice and answering the question of whether sacrifice is a cultural universal, and if so, what this universality can be based on, what prototypical forms of sacrifice can be identified and how they can be described. The second group of problems is associated with the task of understanding how the phenomenon of sacrifice is changing today and what anthropological meaning these changes have. In a situation where explicit human sacrifice is taboo, one can speak of the emergence of substitute practices and the emergence of analogs in which the structural elements of the classical ritual are distributed in space and time and are presented in a different order. As a result, in modern society, victims-sufferers are analogous to classical sacrificial victims and therefore often go through sacralizing rituals and practices. However, a fundamentally important question is whether a structure change in distributed sacrifice incurs a change in social functions? And if these changes exist, how essential they are, how much they affect the very semantic core of the anthropology of sacrifice. The third group of problems is associated with the sphere of praxis in its classical understanding, i.e., it represents issues related to political, economic, and ethical implications associated with the phenomenon of sacrifice and analogs of the ritual of sacrifice in modern societies. Here it is also impossible to avoid relating modern discourses and practices to archaic prototypes and identifying similarities and differences, and most importantly, describing transformations and problematizing their anthropological meaning. Since modern society is immersed in the media environment, it is extremely important to discuss the influence of the media on these processes. In general, the anthropology of sacrifice as a research project allows us to look at many of the most pressing social issues of our time from a new angle.

The article discusses the possibilities of the formal analysis of the fine-art painting composition on the basis of the classical definitions of beauty and computational aesthetics’ approaches of the second half of the 20th century he authors define the problem and consider solutions for the formalization of aesthetic perception in the context of aesthetic text, i.e., as part of the fine arts composition – a formal sequence of signs simply ordered in accordance with the syntactic rules’ system. The methodology of the research is defined by the general semiotics, distinguishing semantics, syntax, and pragmatics of a sign, by the aesthetic analysis’ methods, ranging according to the author’s message aesthetics, receptive aesthetics, and text aesthetics, as well as by the computational analysis methods connected with neural network means of defining the images’ symmetry. The article reveals preconditions for the emergence and also the current state of computational aesthetics as an interdisciplinary branch of knowledge. Analyzing the problem from the perspective of philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, and technology, the authors draw attention to the need to improve the computational aesthetics methods. Firstly, the existing methods do not always enable to describe the fine-art object adequately. Secondly, there exists the so-called reduction of aesthetic assertion transforming it into the assertion concerning the object’s external characteristics. As a result, the authors assume that the increasing complexity of the current mathematical models and the experts’ subjective assessment support will allow to reach a compromise solution that enables the development of computational aesthetics as a branch of knowledge. Enhancement and development of the mathematical models, taking into account the rules of semiotics and subjectivism of the human perception, is the relevant objective of computational analysis of the aesthetic fine-arts text. The results of the present research supports the classic statement regarding the underivability of semantic and pragmatic propositions from syntax. The research concludes that relevant objectives are to find a correlation between, one the one hand, the axes and points of symmetry, deriving from the neural simulation, and, on the other hand, aesthetic effect, emerging from the perception of fine-art paintings.

The article reviews the regular international scientific conference on science fiction – Stanisław Lem Readings. The conference is held since 2007 by the Department of Philosophy in collaboration with the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature and Public Relations of the Samara National Research University. The summary shows the history of the conference, formulates the main definitions of the category of science fiction, proposed by its participants, demonstrates the topics, genres, and key approaches that make up the problem field, lists its most eminent speakers. Lem Readings are currently an international platform for a regular interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophers of technology and futurologists, active engineers and scientists, anthropologists and sociologists. The basic principles of the conference – freedom of expression, professionalism, striving for the synthesis of heterogeneous systems – remain unchanged during the years, and they correspond to the idea of the science fictional as a possibility that can be realized.

The article reviews the Philosophy of Culture Seminar (lead by V.A. Konev) as a cultural and philosophical phenomenon. The article discusses the seminar’s research program, its basic scientific principles, as well as the content of books published as a result of the seminar. The Philosophy of Culture Seminar became the basis for the formation of a philosophical community in Samara. Thanks to the constant work of the theoretical seminar, Samara philosophers found themselves in a situation of compulsion to fundamental philosophical practices – reading and discussing philosophical texts, polemics, debates. Reading and discussing the fundamental works of contemporary philosophy has become a good school for many Samara philosophers, allowing them to clarify or redevelop their methodological position. The Philosophy of Culture Seminar in Samara gives us an example of how the existence and development of philosophy is possible not only in Russia but in the whole culture, of how a very rich environment of philosophical communication and living philosophical thought are vital for philosophy.