Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. _The Crisis of Ugliness_, published here in English for the first time, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics.

The object of this paper is creativity as a cultural philosophical and historical-philosophical phenomenon. The subject of the research is the substantiation of the essence of creativity by Russian religious philosophy on the example of the doctrine of V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev. The aim of this research is to identify and articulate the key semantic constructs of creativity from the positions of the above-mentioned thinkers. The article also explores ideas about the nature of creativity and the specific features of (...) a creative subject through the prism of relevant concepts of a socio-humanitarian orientation. A brief historical and philosophical excursion into the understanding of the ontological essence of creativity is carried out, modern ontological concepts of creativity are revealed and an existentially oriented concept of creativity is proposed. The theoretical basis of the research is the original works of V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev, as well as various commenting scientific sources. The methodological foundation of the research is a comparative analysis and a method of contextual vision of creativity. The main result of the conducted research is the articulation of key aspects of the understanding of creativity by V.S. Solovyov and N.A. Berdyaev. It is shown that for the first philosopher, the central task of creativity is the spiritualization of the material world through the realization of the unity of Goodness, Truth and Beauty, while the second thinker considers the main mission of creativity to be the establishment of a fundamentally different spiritual being by the subject. The scientific novelty of the research also lies in the comparative characterization of the concepts of creativity of these thinkers in terms of essence, tasks, meaning, material, sources, functions, result and other structural aspects. (shrink)

The object of this research is the fragmented everyday life of social life practices. The subject of the research is personal stories realized in storytelling and considered as the result of the creative activity of the subject and a way to overcome the fragmentation of everyday life of modern culture. The authors consider the fragmentation of everyday life as a factor in the desocialization of the subject and the leveling of unified mechanisms of social interaction. Storytelling is defined as a (...) way for a person to consistently present various storylines and broadcast the principles of their personal existence, creating an effect of belonging among recipients and awakening their imagination. The research substantiates that storytelling resources allow a subject to broadcast personal values, creatively express their individuality through virtual self-presentation and respond to current public demands, thereby overcoming the fragmentation of everyday life. As the conclusions of the research, the authors state that public order and social interaction are conditioned by the influence of the narratives of each subject on the foundation of their own being and the formation of a vector of development of all participants in intersubjective relations through the dissemination of the principles of personal existence in the storytelling system. The authors emphasize the creative nature of personal stories, the creation and telling of which is a prerequisite for the formation of unified principles of social existence due to the transmitted ideas about socially acceptable rules and stable patterns of behavior that become a set of rituals. The authors conclude that personal stories allow the subject to overcome fragmented everyday life, move to a qualitatively new level of normative determination, develop a strategy of self-identity and move from a separate way of being to a holistic existence in the context of intersubjective interactions. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and (...) spiritual context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Increasingly, the private sector is playing a greater role in supporting peace building efforts in conflict and post-conflict areas by providing critical expertise, know-how, and capital. However, reports of the corrupt practices of both governments and businesses have plagued international peace building efforts, deepening the distrust of stricken communities. Businesses are perceived as being selfish and indifferent to the impact their operations may have on the social and political development of local communities. Additionally, the corruption of local governments has been (...) cited as interfering with the creation of stability in conflict areas. Within this framework, multinational Public-Private Partnerships can exert two forms of influence: they can either exacerbate these problems, or they can become part of the solution. Without a relationship of trust among local businesses, government, and the private sector, peace building efforts will at best be mixed, and could possibly perpetuate violence in fragile states. Public and private interests are better served when Public-Private Partnerships are based upon collaboration and assist in establishing principles of good governance in conflict areas. This in turn can help build trust and regain the credibility of both sectors among local communities, which are essential in making Public— Private Partnerships more effective. (shrink)

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky's program in linguistics. This approach is thought to provide a fruitful perspective from which to investigate moral competence from computational, ontogenetic, behavioral, physiological and phylogenetic perspectives. In this article, (...) I outline a framework for UMG and describe some of the evidence that supports it. I also propose a novel computational analysis of moral intuitions and argue that future research on this topic should draw more directly on legal theory. (shrink)

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis (...) to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Russian Romanticism, which first acquired recognizable contours in the 1820s, was a substantively significant phenomenon in Russian culture. Russian Romanticism assumed the unique forms of a sociophilosophical and literaryesthetic current that did not take shape within the confines of a purely literary movement. Romanticism was an important element in the culturalhistorical development of mankind; it was a special type of philosophicalhistorical interpretation of the world and a special type of esthetic awareness and literary-artistic conduct.