According to Proudhon, before Kant, the believer and the philosopher moved “by an irresistible impulse,” asked themselves, “What is God!” They then asked themselves “Which, of all religions, is the best!” “In fact, if there does exist a Being superior to Humanity, there must also exist a system of the relations between this Being and Humanity. What then is this system! The search for the best religion is the second step that the human mind takes in reason and in faith. (...) Kant gave up these insolvable questions. He no longer asked himself what is God, and which is the best religion; he set about explaining the origin and development of the Idea of God; he undertook to work out the biography of this idea.” And the results he attained were as great as they were unexpected. “What we seek, what we see, in God, as Malebranche said ... is our own Ideal, the pure essence of Humanity ... The human soul does not become conscious of its Ego through premeditated contemplation, as the psychologists put it; the soul perceives something outside itself, as if it were a different Being face to face with itself, and it is this inverted image which it calls God. Thus morality, justice, order, law, are no longer things revealed from above, imposed upon our free will by a socalled Creator, unknown and ununderstandable; they are things that are proper and essential to us as our faculties and our organs, as our flesh and our blood. In two words religion and society are synonymous terms, man is as sacred to himself as if he were God.”. (shrink)

Frant︠s︡uzskiĭ materializm XVIII veka -- Frant︠s︡uzskie istoriki vremen Restavrat︠s︡ii -- Sot︠s︡ialisty-utopisty -- Idealisticheskai︠a︡ nemet︠s︡kai︠a︡ filosofii︠a︡ -- Sovremennyĭ materializm.

According to the prevailing scholarly view, made popular by Neil Harding, Lenin is said to have derived his well-known theory of working-class consciousness in What Is To Be Done? from G. V. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism. Is this article I demonstrate, however, that Plekhanov and Lenin disagreed quite sharply on this question. Plekhanov did not believe that workers would fail to develop a socialist consciousness in the absence of external intervention. Indeed, Plekhanov was a (...) thorough-going optimist about proletarian capacities, and while he did assign an important role to the intelligentsia in the process of consciousness-raising, that role was carefully circumscribed. An exhaustive review of Plekhanov's writings before November 1903, when he broke with Lenin, reveals just how unorthodox Lenin's most famous argument was in the context of Russian Social-Democratic theory. (shrink)

In domestic scientific and public opinion, interest in religion as a new worldview paradigm is very high. Today's attention to the Christian religion in our society is connected, in our opinion, with the specificity of its value system, which distinguishes it from other forms of consciousness: the idea of ​​God, the absolute, the eternity of moral norms. That is why its historical forms do not receive accurate characteristics and do not matter in the mass consciousness. Modern religious beliefs do not (...) always arise as a result of the direct influence of church preaching. The emerging religious values ​​are absorbed in a wide range of philosophical, artistic, ethical ideas, acting as a compensation for what is generally defined as spirituality. At the same time, the appeal to Christian values ​​became very popular. (shrink)

The author contends that living is a process of interpretation and thinking is a dialogue between experience and reflecting.

The time that has elapsed since the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU has confirmed the accuracy and profundity of the congress's analysis of the principal processes taking place in the development of humankind today. This analysis is very relevant for an understanding of the dialectics of war, peace, and social progress in our epoch. The congress emphasized that the struggle to reduce the threat of world war and to curb the arms race has been, and continues to be, the central (...) direction in the foreign political activity of the CPSU and the Soviet State. "In defending peace," L. I. Brezhnev stated in the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU, "we are working not just for people living today, and not just for our children and grandchildren: we are working for the happiness of countless future generations.". (shrink)

In the writings of Soviet philosophers and biologists, both individual and team-written, one finds interesting thoughts on contradictions in animate nature and on the diversity and specifics thereof. It must be stated, however, that biotic contradictions have been studied considerably less than social ones. We are still at the beginning of the road to the solution of this problem. One of the reasons for this is the profoundly erroneous notion that study of contradictions in nature, animate and inanimate, inevitably resolves (...) to adducing illustrations of the operation therein of the universal law of the unity and struggle of opposites. However, research on the objective dialectics of nature, particularly the contradictions inherent in it, signifies not mere adducing of examples illustrating the universal laws of dialectics, but knowledge of the specific ways in which they manifest themselves, particularly of those diverse and contradictory connections and relationships of which life is woven. (shrink)

This book attempts, through a series of interpretive discussions, to confront a number of well-known perplexities in their structural form of disjunctive moments, of interpretive contexts of 'this is' and 'this is not.'.

Before talking about national science as a specific phenomenon we find out the essence of science as a phenomenon in general. We note that science is one of the most complex phenomena of social life. Complex understanding of it complicates the fact that science is structurally extremely complex, polyfunctional, historically variable, with many of its faces included in this or that sphere of social life. It therefore appears as an extremely diverse social phenomenon. This raises some difficulties in developing a (...) general definition of it. As G. Volkov correctly pointed out, "there is nothing simpler than giving a definition to any phenomenon, when the whole thing is only in the formulation, and there is nothing more complicated than when it comes to the concentration in the concentrated form of the very essence of the object under study". (shrink)