RAINER MARIA RILKE’S POETRY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF GUNTHER ANDERS AND HANNAH ARENDT AND THE CRISIS OF FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY

Reviewed by: Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics by James M. Magrini and Elias Schweiler Shawn Loht MAGRINI, James M. and Elias Schweiler. Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics. New York: Routledge, 2018. xi + 234 pp. Cloth, $140.00 This study provides an overview of principal themes in Martin Heidegger's philosophy in the post-Being and Time work of the 1930s and 1940s. It also considers these themes as they offer new ways of regarding poetry, literature, and education according to the post-metaphysical turn contained in Heidegger's notions of Ereignis (commonly translated as "the event of Being") and philosophy's "other beginning." Although the book is branded within the series Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education, only one chapter addresses the subject of education. In the introductory chapter, the authors survey current perspectives on the "turn" in Heidegger. A middle-ground approach is adopted, according to which Heidegger's post-Being and Time thought is characterized by an engagement with thinking conceived from out of the domain of truth, rather than the transcendental subjectivism of Dasein; a receptivity to Being, as seen in notions like Gelassenheit and Being's "mystery"; a concentration on the "event" of Being, understood communally and historically; and philosophy conceived as a practice rather than an academic exercise. For the authors, the concept of language is an especial locus around which Heidegger's post-turn thinking takes shape. The first main chapter of the book examines the issues prompting Heidegger's turn by contrasting the Cartesian-Kantian framework pervading Being and Time's portrayal of Dasein with the historical, destiny-laden conception of being-there Heidegger comes to formulate in 1936's Contributions to Philosophy, the various Hölderlin lectures, and 1938's "The Origin of the Work of Art." The authors suggest that in these works, Heidegger aims to articulate a conception of Being not predicated on the metaphysical confines of describing Dasein; as a result, Heidegger's accomplishment is to articulate Being's aspect of transcending human existence, where Being is understood as an event, and where language is of a piece with this event. On the whole this chapter provides a very balanced and informative account of precisely why Being and Time's approach is problematic and the manner in which the later Heidegger attempts to correct it. The second main chapter, on the topic of Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin and Rilke, takes up the question of how Heidegger conceives poetry to exhibit a saving power from the dangers of modern technology, and why Hölderlin in particular reinvigorates the nonmetaphysical poetic thinking initially fostered in Presocratic thought. The authors hold that Hölderlin's poetry is nonrepresentational; it gestures toward images that communicate clues about the original event of Being and a time when gods were present to the human realm. The book's second half begins with a chapter on the poetry of French Arthur Rimbaud and the twentieth-century Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. What may seem an arbitrary pairing bears a fruitful [End Page 393] outcome; the authors read selections from these two poets in light of the later Heidegger's suggestion emphasizing the "path" or "way" of thought rather than its content (not out of step with the adage "ways, not works" with which Heidegger prefaces the Gesamtausgabe). Indeed, although greater poets could have been chosen from the canon of Western poetry, the authors aim to illustrate through modern and contemporary poets the "ways" poetic thinking can take when it is nonmetaphysical. Whereas, too often scholars rely on Heidegger's own preferred poets without making an effort to consider whether other poets might equally exhibit poetry expressive of the kind of poetic thinking the later Heidegger envisions. The penultimate chapter of the book explores a similar track with a reading of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, a novel whose main character appears to transcend metaphysical analysis. The book's final chapter, on education, is slightly out of step with the rest of the book; however, this chapter comes off as the most original in that...

Reviews127 the holy" (p. 141). For "the world, luce Heraclitus' world-fire, now has many meanings, and die context in which it appears is as wide as diinking can make it" (p. 142). Another way to put it is uiat the world no longer belongs to Dasein; radier, Dasein finds that he is part of the world. The "turn" to poetic thinking is part of a more general turn in Heidegger toward an open, celebrative way of being in the world. Halliburton suggests tentatively that Heidegger in his essay on the jug may be "building up a case for a new or revived religious spirit" (p. 174). Parallel to die contrast from darker to lighter mood, from anxiety to openness, there is also, Halliburton notes, a change to images of water and waves radier dian a house of being, suggesting a movement toward simplicity and harmony (p. 197), a "festive unity of die four" (p. 176), a world where mortals also think of the immortals and where "everything hinges on thinking the play of die world" (p. 213). Halliburton is to be commended for an interesting, clear, and well-grounded account of the development of "poetic thinking" in the later Heidegger. MacMurray CollegeRichard E. Palmer Autobiography: Towards a Poetics ofExperience, by Janet Varner Gunn; ? & 154 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, $16.50. As Professor Gunn observes, the "classical" theory of autobiography assumes uiat the "true self lies hidden beneath a misleading surface; uiat the individual alone has full access to the depuis where it resides; diat it is atemporal and unchanging; and diat its "fall" into the temporality of language is an unfortunate if unavoidable accident. Most fundamentally, perhaps, by locating the "true self with respect to distinctions between reality and appearance, depui and surface, subject and object, it "unsituates" the self and isolates it from the world. Although this conception of die self has come under increasingly heavy fire from various quarters, most efforts to assess die impact of its demise on the theory of autobiography have been limited to announcing the end of autobiography. Gunn's book is a brave if not wholly convincing effort to provide an alternative view of autobiography based on the conviction that the true self is the public or "displayed" self, and diat it exists only in time and in language. For her, autobiography is an activity that articulates the dialectic between depui and surface and situates die self in relation to its world. Gunn's starting point is not an isolated subject who seeks to express in writing an interiority immediately available to him, but a reader who seeks to make sense of a text. The autobiographer reads his life, and this reading can take place only in the context of a whole culture, including die readings others make of his text. Gunn derives her conception of the "autobiographical situation" in which this reading occurs mosdy from Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics (which has also left its mark on her sometimes excessively abstract style), supplemented by Frank Kermode's analysis of how narrative responds to our need to organize (temporal) experience into comprehensible wholes. In her view, die 128Philosophy and Literature reading/writing of autobiography is a hermeneutical, not an epistemological enterprise. Indeed, she concludes, "Autobiography can be said to model die interpretive activity that makes understanding possible and diat marks our common humanity" (p. 119). Some may object uiat such a formulation, feir from providing a distinctive uieory of autobiography, simply identifies it with the process of understanding in general and offers no criteria for distinguishing it from odier hermeneutical acts or literary genres. Gunn's claim, however, is not just uiat autobiography is an interpretive act among others, but diat it "models" such acts in the sense diat it provides a paradigm case of interpretation as well as "enacts" it. Autobiography could uius be said to be distinguished from other interpretive acts by its self-reflexive dramatization — or, as Paul de Man might put it, its allegory — of reading. While Gunn acknowledges that autobiography sometimes stresses die failures of selfunderstanding rather than its successes, in all the texts she examines (Thoreau's Waiden, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Proust's A...

The object of this article is identification of the key methodological principles of postmodernism (deconstruction, rhizomaticity, nomadic thought etc.), which affect the formation of poetic thinking and poetic rationality, provision of substantial features of these phenomena. The focus of postmodern attention is an allegorically rich text that is read through the rest of the text. Postmodernism involves poetic thinking to the analysis of reality. Poetic thinking is a way of thinking based on the presumption of the principal understatement and metaphoricity. Poetic rationality is also a way of new understanding of the person and the world. Through poetic rationality the person is considered as included in the cosmic being, overcomes division of soul and body, speculative and sensory, physical and mental. By means of poetic rationality, new forms of the authenticity of knowledge, aesthetic understanding of the truth are searched for. The truth is seen as an ontological quality of the person, as the truth of its own existence and it is implemented in the desire. According to poetic rationality, the person becomes the author and creator of its own relationship with the world. That is why the value-willed attitude to life is valued more that moral-willed qualities. Postmodernism offers its own type of rationality, different from the previous ones, that explains the world and person’s attitude to the world through the intuitive, emotional, valuable, metaphorical, personal, poetic. In postmodernism there is a slow transition from poetic thinking to poetic rationality, which revives the mythic and poetic attitude to the world, where the person is in full harmony with nature and is included in the cosmic being. One of the theoretical foundations for the emergence of poetic rationality is metaphoricity of the thinking. Not only the use of the metaphor, but also its interpretation is a manifestation of creativity, imagination and fantasy allowing for the creation of a new look, new approach to any problem. Postmodernism in the poetic rationality manifests its main methodological guidelines: deconstructive and nomadological methodologies, rhizomaticity in the understanding of reality, pluralistic vision of the world, discursivity and intertextuality.

The author of this article presents an analytical study of a poetry forum at kanoonline.com, which targets Northern Nigerian readership. The forum reflects emerging literature as it sets out to shape its own standards of literary creativity, transmission, circulation, as well as communication reality and perception in cyberspace. Poetic texts are created in a digital medium, a means that presents itself as an inexhaustible source for the rapid circulation and unlimited distribution of texts. The emergence of a text as a digital unit ensures the immediacy of its communication to an audience, which simultaneously generates intensive reader feedback. Based on an analysis of selected topics, the author discusses metatextuality as being the essential nature of a digital text. The posting of a text, which is obviously a completed product of individual creation, serves as a starting point for a further creative process. The agent of this textual reworking is the audience which generates different interpretations of a given literary piece. What we witness is a switch from an individual creative process to an impersonal collective deconstruction, a process engendering metatexts. Most of the abovementioned forum’s experimental poetic formations can hardly be captured, identified, comprehended or interpreted well in terms of both content and form for several reasons. The shape of virtual texts may be viewed as awkward, chaotic, and confusing. And the contents of the texts, while definitely reflecting African modernity, on the other hand, is determined by subjectively portrayed day-to-dayness, freely displaying open mundane experiences in a fragmentary and momentary way. Forum poetry — poetic creation, performance, publication, reading, and perception altogether — within the virtual space has an explosive effect, which is unpredictable, uncontrolled, chaotic and momentary. Moreover, poetic content often makes a strong reference to certain immediate and fragmentary environments of African everyday life which are most urgent and alive at the very time of creation, performance and perception. Thus, capturing virtual texts within this broad context — the context of author/reader interaction, communication and creation — enables one to read both the content and formal properties inherent in the genre of web-forum poetry.

The article is devoted to the category of corporeality and the forms of its implementation in V. Shalamov’s lyrics, viz. identifying both the uniqueness of the poet’s artistic approach and the connections with tradition, in particular, acmeistic one. The stated problems have not become the object of detailed literary anal-
 ysis yet. To disclose the topic, the author of the article uses materials of V.T. Shalamov’s archive (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art). The article considers the most important perspectives concerning the realization of corporeality category, viz. the principle of revealing mental aspects 
 of a personality’s life through the prism of body images, when certain emotional sensory or ideological facets are realized in a poetic text with the help of a somatological code; the relation and interaction of spiritual and physical in the characteristic of the lyrical subject; the semantic filling of key leitmotifs in Shalamov’s lyrics related to the corporate sphere and human organism. The study reveals and considers Shalamov’s characteristic property of poetic thinking consisting in extrapolating corporeality to the phenomena of natural 
 world, as well as intelligible phenomena. The author touches upon Shalamov’s attitude to religion and specifics concerning the refraction of moral ideas in poetic discourse through the prism of tangible images. The article discloses aspects 
 relating to the interpretation of corporeality problem in Shalamov’s lyrics and correlating with acmeistic artistic attitude.

Abstract:My chapter considers work of two contemporary poets, Juliana Spahr and Robert Minhinnick. Their poetry has been productively approached as performing an ecological writing or ecopoetics; critics have also focused upon their work as establishing dynamic relationships between local and global. This discussion considers network of relationships established between lyricism and encounters with other places in Spahr and Minhinnick's war poetry. For Spahr these encounters are with virtual places, heavily mediated through information systems and newsgathering networks. Minhinnick's travelogue poem about Iraq uses conceit of radioactive dispersal as a way of foregrounding multiple transitions in his work. His attempts a dissemination of self that can establish a sustainable reflection upon war. Ultimately, both poets' shared position of negotiating ideas of encounter in long poem creates a form that addresses war by focusing on processes of mobility, transition and inclusion.Key names and concepts: Lyn Hejinian, Robert Minhinnick, Charles Olson, Michael Palmer, Juliana Spahr; encounter, long poem, subjectivity, war poetry.In her poetics statement for American Poets in 21st Century: New Poetics, Juliana Spahr proposes:There are so many rules about how to write poetry that there might as well not be any at all. Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one language. It repeats. It pursues a conventional language and divergent typography. It often experiments. It can be ephemeral and occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as it does all this. And all that helps me think. (Spahr 2007: 131)Later in her statement Spahr states that poetry is associated with movement, duration and transport: The feeling of being set in motion, a feeling that moves one to (132). These ideas of thought and movement recall Robert Pinsky's identification of a lyric that presents the poet talking, predicating, moving directly and as systematically and unaffectedly as he would walk from one place to another (Pinsky 1976: 133). Broadly speaking, Pinsky's model of a lyric, posits self as primary organizing principle of work. Central to this tendency is articulation of subject's feelings and desires, and a strongly marked division between subjectivity and its articulation as expression. What is most apparent in discursive model of is immanence of self and its centrality in composition as subject of writing. Unlike Pinsky's perception of poetic thinking as an inchoate interiority that retains its privacy and inclusion, Spahr's ambition is to create a discursiveness which moves outward, towards world. Spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs (2005b) was written as a response to 9/1 1 and Iraq war. sequences in volume create a space of duration and process, moving impetus of work beyond a drive towards a epiphany. Instead of an entry into a corralled personal realm, volume creates an important human ecosystem in its attempts to make relationships between poetic text, human body and world. This gesture to establish a discursiveness sited beyond interiority is mentioned by Spahr as an ambition to create dealing with complex questions of how to talk to one another. More poems that acknowledge how difficult that is. More poems that look outward (Spahr 2002: 8).The speaker in Robert Minhinnick's 'Return of Natives' from King Driftwood suggests wryly that be I'm / back could be supplementary information / exists could be I never / left (2008: 97). Minhinnick's poetry is frequently cited as incorporating elements of travel writing, his poems often seek linkages between his native Wales and a global community. This claim is supplemented by his collection of prose essays that include meditations on travel, ecology, war and politics: Watching Fire Eater (1992), Badlands (1996) and To Babel and Back (2005). …

This article examines European origins of Pushkin's and Lermontov's romantic motif 'wandering in the night' in the works of German and English Romantic poets. The image of the night as an «echo» of the day held an important place in the hierarchy of «universal empathy» in the Romanticist poetic thinking («the light also shines in the night», interpret-ing the biblical text: «and the light shines in darkness, and darkness has not embraced it» (John 1:5). In the famous works by Pushkin and Lermontov, «The Winter Road», «The Possessed», and «I Go Out Alone on the Road...», wander-ing in the night is immersed in an atmosphere of romantic dual reality. The motif of communication in poetic texts is by no means the property of our global communication age alone, but goes back to earlier eras: Antiquity (Homer's Odys-sey), the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (the poetry of Dante and Chaucer), Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism (the poetry of Goethe, Eicheldorf, and Hölderlin). Pushkin's later poem «The Wanderer» (1835) goes back to John Benja-min's poem «The Way of the Pilgrims» (1678). Pushkin's poetic quest of the 1830s turned to the motifs of Salvation and Light, the search for the Right Way (the image of a young man reading a book (the Bible) in «The Wanderer», showing the traveler the Right Way and the narrow gate of Salvation). Lermontov, in his famous nocturne «I go out alone on the road...» (1840s), creates an image of a traveler in the night, which is closely related to the tradition of the German Romantics: Goethe, Eichendorff, and Hölderlin. Pushkin's «night inquiries» in 1830 and 1835 texts, with refer-ences to John Benjamin's English poem and to the Lake School poets W. Wordsworth and R. Southey, are a striking proof of F. M. Dostoyevsky's thoughts on the «universal empathy» of our great poet.

ABSTRACTAgainst interpretations of Marshall McLuhan as philosophical materialist, I argue that Understanding Media and its tagline, the medium is the message, show McLuhan to be an immaterialist: a poetic, intuitive thinker, at least as interested in immaterial as in material aspects of the world. From a pragmatic perspective, or one requiring attention to both poetic and technical modes of understanding, McLuhan’s approach—offering a torrent of flashing insights and neglecting the process of empirically assessing these insights—is described as poetic excess. This is a double-edged sword, alienating many readers even as it inspires others. McLuhan’s poetic excess is a rhetorical reminder of the value and power of poetic thinking, and simultaneously of its insufficiency for the fullest understanding. Pleading that his poetic texts should be read rhetorically rather than literally, I argue we should forgive McLuhan’s worst affronts to technical, materialist rationality. McLuhan’s immaterialist epistemology, inseparable from the content of his insights, is a valuable part of his distinctive and foundational contribution to media studies.

The results of the study of the nature of the verbal image of the world of folk poetical discourse in the field of a new branch of philological science – cognitive poetics are presented in the article. Cognitive poetics studies artistic semantics through linguistic cognitive strategies for the formation and elaboration of knowledge about the outside world (real or quasi-real), embodied in poetic texts. Using the method of cognitive perspective analysis of verbal poetic image (L.I. Belekhova), the content and meaning of pre-conceptual, conceptual and verbal sides of the object of the study were revealed. An attempt was made to reconstruct the etymology of the word vride for the most ancient period of Indo-European speech, to outline the linguistic-cognitive mechanisms of the creation of German-speaking verbal poetic images of the 13th century, to trace the dynamics and development of their semantic content. In the process of juxtaposition of modern and medieval concepts of “peace” it is found out that the general conception of the phenomenon has changed in the direction: “whole”/“part”. Nomen vride is a *prita- form with the meaning of “size” and occurs in other Indo-European (Sanskrit, Latin) and Nostratic (Uralic, Altaic, Semitic-Hamitic, Dravidian, Kartvelian) languages. It is established that the verbal poetic image of the world of the XIII century was crystallized in the bowels of basic (archetypal), conventional (stereotype) and individual knowledge of ethnicity, the degree of its novelty depends on the type of linguistic-cognitive mechanism underlying the internal form of this image. The inner form shows that the world is a dynamic mental formation, which synthesizes sensory-evaluative and object-cognitive activity of the medial person, which correlates with the types of poetic thinking (associative, analogue and paradoxical). The type of cognitive mechanism is determined through the analysis of cognitive operations of formation of verbal poetic image in the analyzed epic poem. It is proved that the mechanisms of creation of verbal poetic images of the world are based on cognitive operations of mapping, deployment, specialization and modification, which include cognitive procedures of generalization, concretization, compression, combinations, extensions. The cognitive mechanism of creating a verbal image is the archetypal conceptual concept of WORLD IS MERCY. Highlight prototypovu conceptual scheme peace is harmony, which led to the emergence of two stereotypical conceptual schemes peace is interpersonal relationships and PEACE is friendship, which became the conceptual basis of verbal poetic images peace is positive / negative experiences, peace is life, peace is negative artifacts peace is violence, PEACE IS A BILATERAL AGREEMENT, PEACE IS A CHOICE, PEACE IS A NEGATIVE EMOTION, PEACE IS A PROPERTY, PEACE IS A SECRET, PEACE IS A TABLE, A PEACE IS A EVALUATION, A PEACE IS AN EVALUATION, A PEACE IS A ESTIMATE.

Introduction. The article is focused on studying the area of intersection of contemporary art and philosophy, it is a continuation of the research project on conceptual art and its intersection with philosophy, which we started earlier. By conceptual art, we mean art aimed at intellectual comprehen- sion of what has been seen, art that appeals to thinking and generates philosophical meanings. But if earlier we explored conceptual cinema and mainly visual art of the early 20 th century, then in this article we want to turn to the visual art of the second half of the 20 th century — the beginning of the 21 st century, which is also called contemporary art by art critics. The empirical material of the study was the works of such contemporary artists as E. Warhol, D. Koons, D. Hirst, J. Ono, F. Bacon, I. Kabakov, D. Kos- suth, the movement of “new realists” and photo- realists, the movement of Moscow conceptualists and etc. Contemporary art is one of the ways of understanding the world, visual philosophy, which is of interest for philosophical understanding. The purpose of the article is to conduct a philo- sophical analysis of visual art of the second half of the 20 th — early 21 st I centuries in order to identify its philosophical sources and content. Methods. The author uses the following gen- eral scientific methods: analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, abstraction. When analyzing works of conceptual art, we use hermeneutic and phenomenological methods, a semiotic approach. We also use the symbolic-contextual method of analyzing exhibition concepts, which is based on identifying the philosophical meanings and ideas of exhibitions of contemporary art. Scientific novelty of the study. We regard con- temporary art as a visual philosophy. Philosophiz- ing, in our opinion, can exist in various forms and forms from everyday practical (the so-called naive philosophizing) to artistic-figurative, that is, visual. Philosophical ideas or concepts are born not only from professional thinkers, but also from artists. The artistic concepts of contemporary artists are similar to the concepts of philosophers, since the goal of both is to cognize the world and grasp be- ing. We find and describe the area of intersection of modern philosophy and contemporary art, each of which is in a situation of crisis separately and continuous dialogue together. Results. In the course of our research, we identify and describe the philosophical origins of visual art in the second half of the twentieth century - early twenty-first century: postmodern philosophical consciousness, conceptualism, the idea of “death of the author” and “death of art”, simulacrum, kitsch and camp, the method of deconstruction and its application in modern art. Conclusions. Visual art of the second half of the 20 th century — early 21 st century is a visual form of philosophical questioning about the essence of art itself, about the existence of a person and be- ing in general. The works of contemporary artists are based on philosophical problems: meaning, speech and meaning, the ratio of the rational and the irrational, the problem of abandonment and loneliness of a person, the problem of the “death of the author” and the alienation of the creator from his work, the idea of the impossibility of objective knowledge of reality.

The current renewal of interest in language creativity raises a number of intriguing problems, as is evident from the stimulating papers in the recent special issue of Applied Linguistics. According to the editors of this issue, however, these papers are not concerned with creativity in a general pragmatic sense but more specifically with poetic creativity, which they define, following Jakobson, as ‘a focus on the message for its own sake’. I argue that this formalist definition is misleading and that one needs to consider other factors in Jakobson's account of the speech event, and crucially how they inter-relate with each other, and that this, in turn, brings up general pragmatic issues as discussed in Searle's speech act theory and Grice's co-operative principle that are directly relevant to an understanding of how creativity is achieved. I conclude that there is no distinctively poetic way of being creative by focusing on the message form, but that creativity is a function of how the message form interacts with other speech act conditions and so has to be accounted for in general pragmatic terms.

Purpose. To consider the uniqueness of Descartes’ way of interpreting poetry as a type of philosophizing that makes it possible to comprehend the metaphysical nature of man. Its implementation involves the consistent solution of the following tasks: a) understanding methodological changes in the philosophy of the 20th century in the process of actualization of anthropological interest; b) argumentation of the importance of poetic thinking for early Descartes in the process of addressing modern historians of philosophy and the thinker’s texts. Theoretical basis. I rely on the conceptual positions of phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. Originality. Finding of the study is that poetic thinking is the most authentic way of meaningful comprehension of the metaphysicity of man. The paper outlines the nature of the expression of this correlation in the philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and substantiates the thesis about the importance of the poetic principle for understanding the phenomenon of man in early works by Descartes. Conclusions. The paper examined the methodological shifts in anthropologically oriented philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and focused on the manifestations of related moments in the philosophical legacy of Descartes. The latter demonstrates the existence of a still underestimated version of interpreting the metaphysical foundations of human existence, the form of understanding of which is poetic thinking. It is a form of caring for the humane in man.

<i>Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain</i>. Ashley Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. v+197.

The Logical Positivists’ theory of truth developed step by step from a correspondence-theory into a restrained coherence theory. The philosophical ideas which L. Wittgenstein has developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and which represent the logical and historical starting point of the Viennese Circle’s researches, are obviously characterized by a correspondence theory of truth. The logical form in which a molecular statement is constituted by atomic ones reflects the formal structure of facts; and, consequently, just as the existence or non-existence of a molecular fact is determined by the existence or non-existence of its atomic constituents, the truth or falsity of a molecular statement is determined by the corresponding properties of the atomic statements; that is to say: each statement is conceived to be a truth-function of the atomic statements. The evolution of the concept of truth people considered is intimately allied to a change of view concerning the logical function of protocol statements.

The purpose of the article is to study the poem «The Ancient Night of the Universe, or the Wandering Blind» by Semyon Bobrov from the viewpoint of the doctrine belonged to Russian Freemasonry of the 18th –early 19th centuries. It is based on a combinationof mystical, esoteric, Christian (Orthodox) and en-lightening ideas which allowed this movement to organically fit into the socio-cultural context of the pre-romantic epoch. The analysis of the poem as a philo-sophical, allegorical and esoteric text, in turn, has revealed Russian Freema-sonry’s specificity consisted in the close interaction of various religious, philo-sophical and ethical systems. The special eclecticism of S. Bobrov’s thinking is reflected in the onto-logical, epistemological and axiological problems of the poem and expressed at all levels of the poetic text such as ideological-thematic, figurative, composi-tional and poetological ones. «Dreamy mysticism», consonant with the pre-romantic worldview, creates a general atmosphere of mystery in thepoem and serves as the basis for the image formation of Nesham, the main character, as well as a system of symbols (an eye, a ray, a circle, a temple, a mirror, an oil lamp, etc.). Moreover, S. Bobrov builds the poem structure according to the cat-egories and principles of esoteric thinking like universal correspondences, liv-ing nature (the world as a «chain of being»), mediation and imagination, trans-mutation and concordance. At the same time, a special place in the poem is occupied by the ideas of inner freedom and morality, mercy and compassion, which testifies to the poet’s closeness to Orthodox culture. S. Bobrov’s human-istic orientation, special interest to the category of intellect and attention to epistemological problems testify an «enlightenment» trace in the poet’s worldview. Thereby, the combination of heterogeneous religious, philosophical and cultural concepts in S. Bobrov’s work can be explained by the poet’s close-ness to Russian masons of the 18th –early 19th centuries.