Yvon Brès (born in 1927), barely known in Russia, is a significant figure in many areas of culture in France. Dozens of dissertations were written under his academic advising. He is (since 1972) the editor-in-chief of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, the oldest philosophical journal in France, since 1970, he has been professor (now emeritus) of the university Paris-VII which was the first in France to introduce psychoanalysis into university curriculum. His doctoral dissertation dealt with “Plato’s psychology”; he also authored a number of monographs on interaction between philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Сontrary to perception of Freud’s ideas as an epistemological revolution associated with the discovery of the unconscious, he showed that, taking Freud as a starting point but not confining oneself to interpretations offered by him, we are able to find out the cultural persistence and at the same time actuality of a whole series of philosophical and religious issues, even though they are formulated differently in different epochs. This is what Yvon Brès’s main books are about.

The article explores the philosophical and political views of French President Emmanuel Macron. The author considers the position of E. Macron on the role of philosophy in social life as a system of knowledge that allows to understand the meaning of events. The Macron’s interpretation of the problems of interpreting philosophical ideas in politics is explained through ideology, inevitability of evil in history, justification of the principles of antitotalitarianism, gift and forgiveness. The article also considers the influence of Paul Ricœur on the formation of the philosophical worldview of E. Macron. The main provisions of Macron’s political program that qualifies its position as positive pragmatism are analyzed, and in essence it is one of the forms of social liberalism. The author presents a review of the statements of famous French philosophers about the activities of E. Macron.

Eugène Minkowski (1885-1972) is the founder of phenomenological psychopathology in France. He developed, based on ideas of Bergson, Husserl and Scheler, a peculiar variant of philosophical anthropology, which is based on the concept of life time (le temps vécu). Considering the problem of time as one of the main problems of modern culture, he saw the man’s task in learning to live spontaneously and freely in time. Realizing time as becoming in the Bergsonian sense, as the essence of being itself, as a synonym for life, Minkowski reinterprets the concept of élan vital, avoiding resorting to the sphere of biological facts and highlighting the phenomenological approach. From his point of view, the individual and personal impulse with which the person is asserted in the surrounding world representing the superindividual factor, inseparably connected with the human consciousness, plays the most important role. Criticizing traditional psychology, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis, Minkowski develops his own concept of the unconscious. In an effort to determine the nature of the difference between the psyche of a patient and a healthy person, he links this difference to whether the “élan vital” inherent in each person manages to harmonize his contact with reality.

The Bruno Cany’s article is devoted to rethinking of the role and importance of sophistry in the history of the Greek thought. The author stresses that modern scholarship is gradually moving from the purely negative evaluation of the sophists to the realization of their most important positive role in the formation of anthropological ideas, where the sophists actually were forerunners of Socrates and Plato. Sophistic anthropology is characterised by the following traits: 1) its fundamental concepts are concepts of virtue and logos; 2) in the sophistry the process of thinking has a visual character: it is an archaic trait that opposes the sophistry to the mode of thinking based on conceptual abstractions; 3) the way of thinking characteristic for sophists has a prominently tragic nature associated with the painful birth of the European individual man; 4) sophistic thought is realized in the practice of «double utterances». The author examines those general features of the sophistic anthropology as exemplified by doctrines of three prominent sophists: Protagoras, Hippias and Prodikos. In conclusion, the author proves that sophistry in the history of European thought marks the emergence of individual man and his autonomy from theological and physical determinations, the appearance of interiority and the eve of the anthropological revolution in Greece.

The article is devoted to the analysis of theoretical heritage of Cabanis, who, according to many interpreters, was the foremost representative of vulgar materialism in the French philosophical tradition. The phenomenon of vulgar materialism is often seen by historians of ideas as the evidence of the spiritual degradation of the era, the proof of its creative exhaustion. Such a scheme allowed to speak about the decline of French philosophy at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries, about the weakening of a critical element in the culture and the predominance of straight-dogmatic. The article proves that the existence of vulgar materialism in the final stage of Enlightenment in France is problematic and can be questioned. The philosophy of the Directory and the Consulate is not reduced to the simplified version of prior doctrines. It has certain characteristics and the key to understanding of them is in many respects the philosophy of Cabanis. The article shows that in his final work Cabanis defended the ideas that are incompatible with the position of vulgar materialism. The author gives arguments that allow us to speak about the absence of a sharp discontinuity in his views, about the possibility to interpret his work without relying on the idea of changing of ideological positions. Cabanis’ philosophy includes the attitudes, typical for the Age of Enlightenment in general: a critique of despotism, the desire to disprove prejudices, the call to contribute to the happiness of the human race by eliminating all injustices. The statements about the relationship of medicine and ethics, moral as the manifestation of physical bear on them-selves the imprint of the influence of materialistic ideas. But the concept of the supreme cause, specific interpretation of the problem of religion, the thesis of the impossibility of metaphysics give Cabanis’ doctrine a unique identity, allowing to consider his legacy as a source of inspiration for the supporters of the opposite trends in subsequent philosophy: positivistic and spiritualistic.

This text precedes the translation into Russian of the E. Le Roy’s work “Une enquête sur quelques traits majeurs de la philosophie bergsonienne” (“On some basic features of the Bergsonian philosophy”). This work is the preface to the issue of the journal “Archives de philosophie” (1947) devoted to the Bergsonian conception. Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954) is a French philosopher and evolutionist, one of the prominent representatives of Catholic modernism; he is а pupil and friend of Bergson, colleague and collaborator of P. Teilhard de Chardin. He has created a special version of the philosophy of the spirit, which is based on the idea of thought-action, i.e. the effective function of thinking. In his conception, Leroy is widely relied on data from paleontology, biology, anthropology, and the theory of evolution. He made a significant contribution to the development of the noosphere theory. The following article not only sets forth the ideas of Bergson, but outlines those directions of their development which Le Roy sought to follow in his own work.

Edouard Le Roy considers in this work a number of the main principles of the Bergson’s teaching, analyzes Bergson’s interpretation of such concepts as intellect and intuition, duration, freedom. While objecting to the critics of the metaphysics of the French intuitionist, he himself somewhat corrects several provisions of his philosophy, revealing their profound meaning. Presenting Bergson’s understanding of the relationship of spirit and matter, Le Roy correlates his teaching with his own concept of “the needs for idealism”.

Today more than ever before philosophers turn to the problem of human reciprocity and its meaning for the emergence and existence of human civilization. French thinkers Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) and Paul Ricœur (1913-2005) spent years developing this most pressing problem of the modern world. Levinas “deconstructed” philosophy in a way (in the sense of J. Derrida) by focusing it on the relations between one man and another and presenting ethics as the “first philosophy”. Ricœur, in a sense, continued the project of Levinas: analyzing and at the same time criticizing many aspects of his compatriot’s ethical philosophy, he followed Aristotle’s understanding of ethos as ethics, as “aiming at the good life with and for other in just institutions”, where politics is the architectonics of ethics. The main thing in politics is the disposition of people towards each other, their rapport and ability to live together, their duty to further the humanization of people and their relations, to transfer the achievements of culture to next generations.We discuss the topic as formulated in the title of our article with recourse to the ideas of other modern researchers from France, Germany, USA , Russia etc.

For almost 18 centuries, Christianity represented for the West the Religion - the Unique and True one - all the others, from ancient paganism to Eastern spiritualities and tribal cults - being considered, at best, as precursors. How-ever, in the wake of the Reformation, the sacredness of the Bible and its uniqueness were gradually challenged by the development of sciences: philological, archaeological, historical, etc. At the extreme point of this development, we find today the direct approach to the religious feeling itself by the techniques of observation of the cerebral functioning. The idea is thus gradually emerging that the essence of the religious phenomenon lies less in the dogmas - infinitely variable from one religion to another - than in the inner experience of the sacred.The article deals with modern experimental studies of religious experience using methods of neuroscience. The author makes a demarcation between two types of religious experience. On the one hand, this is a mystical union with a personal god. On the other hand, this is a transpersonal yogic experience of the Absolute. The author comes to the conclusion that all reductionist interpretations of such an experience (for example, in terms of endorphins secretion, disturbance of body circuits, projection of memories not recognized as such, etc.) are untenable. In his opinion, such experience can be considered as a manifestation of one of the fundamental and natural human capacities, which various religious traditions try to present as Revelation and subordinate to their dogmas.

The article is aimed at the analysis of F. Laruelle's theory of identity interpreted by this author himself as a response to the post-metaphysical age challenge. In this theory perspective, the scientific thinking is considered as a universal foundation * The article was implemented within the framework of the project of the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research «Linguistic turn and historical knowledge as а problem of Western philosophy of the second half of the XX - early XXI century», grant number of the cultural forms multiplicity that appears independently from philosophy. The immanent contradictions of the new allegedly non-philosophical theory of science offered by Laruelle on the platform of transcendental reflexion and general fractal theory synthesis are revealed. Laruelle's artificial philosophy (non-philosophy) based on the identities theory may be considered, despite his intention to prove its science of philosophy status, as a tool of meta-philosophical reflexion representing an interesting approach to building classical and post-classical Western philosophy patterns of formation that deserves a careful examination.

The author focuses his attention on French intellectuals - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexandre Koyré, Gaston Bachelard, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Perec, Alain de Benoist - and their “spatial” philosophemes conceptualized in the optics of the existential realism. Conceptually, the leitmotif of “the right metaphysics” is proportionate to it: the space is more valuable than time, heterogeneity is more than homogeneity, saturation is better than emptiness, hierarchy is above equality, sphere is more significant than line, return is more worthy than exodus, imagery is more expressive and essential than non-figurativeness. The constructive critical examination of the French experience allows the existential realist to assert himself in the correctness of several important judgments. With all the diversity of landscapes and angles of view, the space is single: natural and cultural; and without physical space there are no spaces of culture. Emptiness and homogeneity are ontologically weak; only the heterogeneous space is potentially strong ontologically. The spatiality of being does not condemn it to subject-object splitting. Space does not oppose a full psychosomatic subject; it confronts only with a reduced, highly intelligible subject. The power of space is primarily determined by a measure of its acceptance / rejection of human being.