Conversation of editor of the journal Voprosy Filosofii I.O. Shchedrina with Full Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Main Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy RAS, V.A. Lektorsky on the history of the creation of the Philosophical Encyclopedia (1960‒1970), on the formation of a professional philosophical community in Russia, on the features of encyclopedic texts on philosophy, and a new project of the electronic Philosophical Encyclopedia.
In conditions of deep social differentiation, science, apparently, is not capable of internal integration. As a result, it cannot fully participate in political life as an independent and equal subject. Turning to the figure of Alexander von Humboldt, the author reconstructs a certain "workaround" of the possible influence of scientists on politics and science management. The importance of the Humboldt brothers for world science in general and Russia, in particular, can hardly be overestimated. Alexander von Humboldt was a specialist in the widest range of disciplines: astronomy, geology, mineralogy, chemistry, biology, and many others. He stood at the origins of modern geography. Today he is called the herald of globalized science. At the same time, during his journey, the first world global network of scientific research was finally completed, the famous network of geological stations, which made it possible to simultaneously record natural and climatic changes in Europe, Russia, and the United States. Today, in an age of fatal environmental change, this endeavor's relevance has finally become common knowledge. The article proposes the idea of the possibility of a mutually beneficial "rational exchange" between science and politics, which is interpreted by the author in the systemic-communicative concept of "structural conjugation".
In a conversation hermeneutic deontology is discussed as a result of the synthesis of the concepts of Sense and Duty. The current situation in the philosophical culture is shows us an undeniable crisis, urgent search for the ways to transfer knowledge, the necessity to respond to technological and information challenges. The question raised about the nature and goals of philosophical activity, about the topology and discursive role of metaphysics, about the relationship between philosophy and creativity. The main points of posing the fundamental for Modernity problem of Cogito are from Descartes – Kant – Husserl to the re-actualization of the transcendental approach to consciousness nowadays. The participants of the conversation talk about possible ways to safely use of "smart machines" that successfully imitate intellectual activity and note that the activity of the Cogito can also be the opposite of comprehension as appropriation, so to speak, making Data mine. The anti-reductionist features of the Russian word "Smysl" (Sense) are noted, which allow us to see Wholeness as the source of all meanings, which cannot be included in Data. Such Smysl holds philosophical discourse together, has a textual expression and deontological status, which can only be guaranteed by the efforts of the participants of the Socratic dialogue. It is noted that Russian philosophy represented by V.S. Solovyev begins not with Cogito, but with Smysl, and this beginning allows this philosophy to be a "moral project".
Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari-shū, 1120s) is the most extensive Japanese didactic tales (setsuwa) compilation, a significant source for exploration of medieval Japanese culture. This tales collection consists of more than one thousand stories, in which action takes place in India, China and Japan. The text had been created by highly educated authors mostly for unsophisticated readers, and in the same time it is positioned on the intersection of different religious and literary traditions. In this paper the way how heritage of those traditions is transformed in setsuwa is considered on the example of conception of wisdom. In Konjaku monogatari-shū this conception is multicomponent, has much in common with one in the Chinese classical philosophy and determined by Buddhist world outlook, which was intrinsic for the investigated tale collection. Great variety of characters from all social groups can be described in the Tales like people, who possess the wisdom in one its aspect or another: there are not only famous sages such as Confucius and Zhuang Zhou, prominent Buddhist saints or even Gautama Buddha himself, not only sovereigns and high officials, but also common laity, men and women, children and elderly people. There is a great similarity between concept of "wisdom" in this text and the one of modern Japanese people.
The goal set by A. Turing – the creation of a thinking machine – is one of the most important scientific problems that has not yet been solved. The modern frontier in this area is the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Modern researchers are looking for different ways to solve this challenging task. In their search, many scholars point out that attempts to use exclusive linguistic communication to solve this problem are not enough. The authors of this article analyze a wide range of research and compare it with well-known research in the field of language and consciousness, which became known as the "Zagorsky experiment". Such a comparison of the latest achievements in the field of AI and an analysis of one of the most breakthrough achievements of neuroscience in the rehabilitation of deaf-blind-mute children is being done for the first time in the literature known to us. Based on the experience of the "Zagorsk experiment", the article concludes that sensory interaction with the outside world is a necessary condition for the creation of AGI. A vision of various forms of interaction between the machine and the surrounding world is proposed: from verbal to non-verbal, from virtual to physical and otherwise. These forms become the basis for the introduction of a new concept of techno-umwelt. Machine transitions from various techno-umwelts can serve as the basis for creating an AGI that has the ability to act as good or better than a human in a variety of environments.
Ethical issues in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) have been widely discussed in recent years, not only in the philosophical, but in the scientific literature. This is largely due to the fear of obvious risks and threats that the growing digitalization causes in almost all areas of social life. Ethical research of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies becomes extremely relevant in the context of creating a general AI system, that is, a human-level agent. This task seems difficult since ethics cannot present to engineers a normative system in the form of a certain hierarchical architecture for its computational implementation. In this regard, authors of this article see an opportunity to avoid this uncertainty in designing an autonomous system of general AI by constructing particular models based on the classifier of activities. This will allow one to algorithmize the necessary ethical functions. There are two circumstances that need to be taken into account in further studies of artificial moral agency: (1) the continuality of any algorithmic model of an ethical system and (2) the effectiveness of the "reinforcement learning" method in modeling a situation of uncertainty and the mechanism of physiological pain as one of the factors in the formation of moral behavior.
The article proposes a solution to the paradox of scientific progress, formulated by Max Weber. Science formulates true and objective judgments, and only this distinguishes it from the world of value judgments, ideology, religion, art. On the other hand, the "lifespan of truths" is extremely small and any statement about scientific progress looks unconvincing just in comparison with the progress of value discourses, where each stage of development (style or work of art), if not replaced by the "best" at least they retain or even increase their value over the centuries. A way out of this paradox, according to the authors, can be offered by a socio-evolutionary interpretation of science, where the "criterion" of a better (or more grounded) theory is viewed as "fitness", as the ability to respond to the challenge of the external environment, to which the best theory adapts better, and as a consequence is selected. The article is devoted to the problems that the biologically based general theory of evolution is facing today when it is extrapolated to the problem of scientific progress. The question is investigated in what sense scientific theories can be interpreted as replacing each other and competing with each other by analogy with organic formations (genotypes, phenotypes, populations); what the external environment of scientific communication is and what institutions are responsible for the selection of the best theories; about the extent to which the autonomous mechanisms of scientific evolution are differentiated, namely, the mechanisms of random variation, natural selection and stabilization of newly acquired traits. The authors analyze the solutions to these problems in the concepts of causal individuation of the scientific theories of David Hull, the concept of semantic individuation of Stephen Gould's theory, and the possibilities of reconciliation and synthesis of these evolutionary approaches in the system-communicative theory of evolution by Niklas Luhmann.
The article summarizes the results of the historical and philosophical research "Collection of ancient stories" (Konjaku monogatari-shū, 1120s). This largest Japanese collection of setsuwa tales paints a picture of world history from the era of Buddha to the age of mappō, "Decline of Buddhist Teaching", tracing the milestones in the spread of Buddhism in India, China and Japan. The two most important Buddhist attitudes – the world is impermanent and at the same time each event is embedded into a universal system of cause-and-effect relationships – are reflected not only at the level of the content of an individual story, but also at the level of connecting stories into a holistic narrative. All events have instructive educative? meaning; everyday experience always leads to the same conclusions as the teachings of Buddha. In this experience, a person inevitably makes some connections – with other people, living and dead, with animals and spirits, gods and buddhas – and these connections involving this person in the cycle of birth and death, if properly understood, provide the basis for liberation. The narrator draws a line between a proper and an inappropriate understanding of what is happening, talking about the "immeasurable" (grief, joy, fear, etc.), and thus allows the readers to find the "measure", kagiri, in their relation to what is happening. The march of time can be understood both as a general movement from the best to the worst, and – on small intervals – as a reverse movement from grief to happiness, from misunderstanding to understanding. A person is free to choose which events to keep in memory and which to forget; people make this choice whilst instructive storytelling, and setsuwa tradition preserves it.
In January 2024, Russian philosophical community celebrated the 90th anniversary of the birth of the famous Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy and science, Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko (1934–2021). Iskra Stepanovna Andreeva used to call her "Russian Diotima", and Erikh Yurievich Solovyev called her an "incomparable interlocutor". She had an amazing ability to speak simply, clearly, and historically substantively about complex subjects. Her works wonderfully combined subject's depth, rationality of argumentation, relevance of the studied problems and existential insight into them. Her epistemological style turns out to be strikingly consonant with the Russian tradition of "positive philosophy", which is based on the idea of concreteness, the aspiration to achieve a "single, internally connected, holistic, and concrete knowledge of reality", as formulated by Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. This tradition also includes the philosophical concepts of Pamfil Danilovich Yurkevich, Princes Sergey Nikolaevich and Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin, and many others. The continuity of Piama Pavlovna's epistemological style with the Russian intellectual tradition is also evidenced in the letter of Russian philosopher and bibliographer Pavel Khristoforovich Kananov (1883–1967), addresed to her (a drift dated 1966 was recently discovered in his archive). We assume that "improvised lucubrations in the midnight hour" written by an "existentialist before existentialism" will make us think once again about the specifics of existential philosophy in Russia. This text is published below.
On September 29–30, 1922, a tragic event for the culture of Russia happened – the expulsion of its intellectual elite from the country began. The execution was replaced by exile. It was a heavy blow to the national culture. And when in the early 1990s this event was described and comprehended in the philosophical literature, the formula "interrupted flight" became the leitmotif. In that time it was experienced and comprehended in this way. Today, however, after another two decades, we can say: yes, it was a terrible blow to Russian humanitarian thought, but its deep traditions still did not disappear without a trace. What did it cost to those who kept the threads of Russian philosophical thought – is a special topic – and we must also remember about them – about the fate of G.G. Shpet, P.A. Florensky, A.F. Losev, I.V. Popov and many others… But, one way or another, thanks to them, philosophical thought and intellectual domestic culture, despite all their seeming ephemerality and fragility, were preserved. They managed to preserve the tradition – despite external circumstances, despite attempts to interrupt it, destroy it, and passed it on to the next generations of humanitarians. Today, to the assessments of this tragic event that took place a century ago, we want to add that efforts aimed at reviving in its entirety and updating the tradition of Russian philosophy continue. And reflections on these efforts, their philosophical understanding is the topic of our article
