General Logic Research Articles

Познавательные универсальные учебные действия в структуре метапредметных результатов

The article deals with the peculiarities of the formation of cognitive universal learning actions in younger schoolchildren. The article describes four types of universal educational actions of primary school children: personal, regulatory, cognitive, communicative, which are an integral system in which the manifestation and development of each individual type of educational action is determined by its relationship with other types and the general logic of age-related development. Detailed characteristics of each of the cognitive universal educational activities of primary school children defined by the standard and the approximate program of primary general education will allow the primary school teacher to more consciously.

Атрибуция тронных кресел царей Бориса Годунова и Михаила Романова в XIX—XXI веках: исторические и искусствоведческие аспекты

Древние тронные кресла отечественных монархов из собрания Музеев Московского Кремля были неоднократно опубликованы на протяжении XIX — XXI вв., но и сегодня нельзя считать работу по их атрибуции законченной. Примером тому — о два древнейших артефакта — тронные кресла царей Бориса Годунова и Михаила Романова: вопрос определения времени и места их создания остается неразрешенным. Ошибка исследователей заключается в том, что их внимание сосредоточено на ювелирном декоре предметов, не был применен метод описания и анализа художественных и технических приемов изготовления артефактов в целом, а также архивная документация изучена в недостаточной степени. По мнению автора, упомянутые предметы являются образцами персидской работы XV–XVI вв., в то время как прежде кресло царя Бориса Годунова датировалось 1603-1605 гг., а атрибуция принадлежавшего царю Михаилу Романову варьировалась между второй половиной XVI — первой третью XVII вв., причисляя изделие к московской или иранской работе. The article examines two ancient throne chairs of Russian monarchs from the collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museums: the chair of Tsar Boris Godunov, which is believed to have been received at the beginning of the 17th century as part of the ambassadorial gifts from Shah Abbas I, and the chair which researchers associate with the name of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich. The aim of the article is a comprehensive study of these objects based not only on their external description, but also on the identification of their structure, parts hidden by metal and woven coatings. In addition, for the first time, the author considers the chairs as pieces of furniture art, trying to “embed” them into the line of the development of artistic styles. In the course of the research, the method of description and analysis of artistic and technical methods of making artifacts, methods of comparative analysis and interpretation of historical sources were applied. The materials of the study were archival documents, published sources and the results of research by Russian historians and museologists. Various historical evidence about the investigated artifacts and views on their dating, reflected in documents and research works, is analyzed. The author compiled descriptions of the throne chairs and made assumptions about the possibility of a later change in their appearance. The analysis of the form and decor made it possible to attribute the throne chair of Tsar Boris Godunov as an example of a Persian work of the 15th–16th centuries; the use of European heritage is clearly traced in the creation of its artistic image. The attribution of the chair of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich cannot be considered final, because today there are several versions of it (a sample of the work of the Moscow Kremlin Workshops of the 17th century, precious plates of Iranian production of, presumably, the 16th century were used in its decoration; Iran, Isfahan, second half of the 16th century (?); work of Iranian court masters of the first third of the 17th century). This throne chair presumably has a pair – the chair of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich: outwardly these objects are remarkably similar and look like a set, in which, with the general logic of shaping, only the manner of decoration is somewhat different. The visual analysis of the monument allows classifying it as a sample of Persian work, made under the influence of the Renaissance art, which spread from Italy to Europe in the 15th–16th centuries. The need to study these rarities with the use of modern technologies and research methods is emphasized.

Kant, Frege, and the normativity of logic: MacFarlane's argument for common ground

AbstractAccording to what used to be the standard view (Poincaré, Wang, etc.), although Frege endorses, and Kant denies, the claim that arithmetic is reducible to logic, there is not a substantive disagreement between them because their conceptions of logic are too different. In his “Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism,” John MacFarlane aims to establish that Frege and Kant do share enough of a conception of logic for this to be a substantive, judicable dispute. MacFarlane maintains that for both Frege and Kant, the fundamental defining characteristic of logic is “that it provides norms for thought as such” (MacFarlane, 2002, p.57). I defend the standard view. I show that MacFarlane's argument rests on conflating the way that pure general logic is normative as a canon and as a propaedeutic, and that once these are distinguished the argument is blocked.

Analyzing and Building an Advertising Image of the Library through User Interviews

Over the past decades, advertising for the library has become a mandatory part of the activity, but the approach to its creation is largely based on accepted stereotypes that express the most common ideas about the properties of such a complex phenomenon as the target audience of the library. Advertising can be expressed through an advertising image that contains not only objective but also subjective information; it uses associations, metaphors, emotions, visualization of something that has a generalizing character, i. e. a layer of implicit information is added to the exact data and read automatically. One of the problems of creating an advertising image may be that there are contradictions between the perception of the person who creates an advertising based on a stereotype and its recipient. The article reflects the experience of the State Public Scientific Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB RAS) in the study of two groups — “Event visitors” and “Readers”. The study involved 326 people (254 visitors to mass events and 72 readers of the SPSTL SB RAS). The author tested the method of semi-formalized interview to get relevant information for better understanding the audience’s motivation and desires. It is assumed to use pre-made plan with a list of mandatory questions, while using general wording and their variations, “close to the text”, and observing the general logic in their sequence.The author analyses the data on distribution of users in both groups (“Event visitors” and “Readers”) by the age categories and employment areas; frequency of library visits; frequency of references to forms of work that are called in demand and found interesting in both groups; frequency of references to preferred information channels. The article presents the main positions for creating an advertising image of the library. The author shows the expediency of using the semi-formalized interview method to adjust the advertising image of the library and the campaign to promote events, resources and services based on it, both for individual groups and for several segments in parallel, if the library’s event or service does not have a specific addressee. The article reveals the method of work that can be applied in the analysis of the advertising image for other libraries.

An Attempt at Systematic Presentation of the History of Political Doctrines in Boris N. Chicherin’s Major Work

ABSTRACT This article examines the classification of political doctrines proposed by Boris N. Chicherin in his major work on the history of political thought. Chicherin uses two forms of systematization for political doctrines: in one, he draws attention to the main element used in explaining society (power, personal freedom, law, or the ideal goal of development); in the other, he refers to the initial level of explanation (rational principles, empirical facts, or a synthesis of the two). This article shows that, despite the great significance of Chicherin’s work in Russian philosophy, his proposed model does not correlate well with the real history of political thought and fails to provide an understanding of the general developmental logic of political ideas. The author demonstrates how a more accurate classification of types of political doctrines took shape in mainstream Russian philosophy, expressed in its final form by Semyon L. Frank in his book The Spiritual Foundations of Society. There are two false understandings of society: “singularism,” in which society is seen as an external combination of ontologically separate persons, and “universalism,” in which individuals are completely subordinated to a single national or universal spirit. Frank calls the accurate approach the “organic theory of society,” where the primary ontological unity of individuals is dialectically combined with their secondary, relative autonomy. This article shows that Chicherin’s main error in his philosophical analysis of society lies in rejecting this ontological unity of individuals as the basis of public life.

Education and Technology for Industrial Power: The German Experience of Human Capital Accumulation

Germany is both an industrial powerhouse and a human capital powerhouse. The first accumulation and rapid development of Germany's human capital not only effectively promoted its industry and economy, but also greatly enhanced its military strength and comprehensive national strength, playing a leading, creating and promoting role in the rise of the country. This paper analyzes the experience of human capital accumulation in Germany from the perspectives of education and science and technology, and discusses the changes of economic and demographic structure, the characteristics of human capital and the investment of human capital. Germany's human capital has three characteristics: cumulative advantage, leading knowledge and career orientation. Germany increases the investment in human capital through policies, funds and innovations. From the experience of Germany, human capital has a fundamental impact on the rise of a country. The general logic is that the rise of a country requires a strong overall national strength and good social order. When a country's human capital accumulates to a considerable extent and forms a great advantage, the vigor of human capital will be fully released under the implementation of appropriate national strategies or even seemingly accidental historical opportunities, which will lead to the release of the creative potential of the society and the economic potential of the country, thus opening the way for the rise of the country. By summarizing the model and experience of human capital accumulation in Germany, this paper provides reference for human capital investment policies of various countries.

Leibniz y Locke : consideraciones sobre los límites y los fundamentos del conocimiento humano

This paper aims to explain Leibniz’s opinion according to which creation and demonstration in mathematics are founded upon a certain general logic that is conversant not only with syllogisms and prosyllogisms, but also with the rules of particular progressions or functions. If this is the case, there would be a universal mathematics or good characteristics, bringing several consequences on what is thought to be the foundation and range of human knowledge. We intend to do such an inquiry mainly using the fictional clash between Theophilus, that stands for Leibniz himself, and Philalethes, that stands for the English philosopher John Locke, regarding the alleged impossibility of squaring the circle claimed by the latter, that is portrayed in the New Essays.

Logic in general and mathematical logic in particular*

Logic in general and mathematical logic in particular*

The ontology of history in the retrospective of Russian philosophy (P. Chaadaev — N. Danilevsky — N. Fedorov)

The article is devoted to one of the features of Russian philosophy — the key role in its development, which was played by the problems of history. The authors begin to study this issue with a general analysis of the status of historical issues in the system of philosophical knowledge, proceeding to substantiate the thesis of the predominantly ontological characteristics of history. The essence of the substantiation of this statement boils down to the fact that philosophy deals with an entity that opens to consciousness as a world, i. e. as a being ordered by man. The world as reality is reality as a form and result of human activity. Consequently, the source of existence as the original is in the foundations of human activity. Next, the authors proceed to consider the reasons why the topic of historical development has become a priority in Russia, and history as a form of human existence has been considered in an ontological way. Using the example of the philosophical creativity of three Russian thinkers (P. Ya. Chaadaev, N. Ya. Danilevsky and N. F. Fedorov), the authors demonstrate the general logic of the development of historical self-consciousness as the basis of civilizational self-determination of Russia. The article draws special attention to the peculiar national pragmatics of Russian historiosophical thought, which implies the need for broad national participation in transformations that have in mind a planetary, cosmic scale. In addition, the authors put forward a polemic thesis about the practical congeniality of the Soviet era to the theoretical intutions of the founder of Russian cosmism. Socialist construction in the USSR, in the understanding of the authors, largely actualized the project of N. F. Fedorov, declaring and actually expressing the “philosophy of the common cause”. And such a “thing” was conceived, despairing and carried out not only in class unity, but also in national unity, the unity of man and woman, and most importantly in the context of Fedorov’s views — in the unity of generations.

Regulation of <i>Drosophila</i> Visceral Muscle Contractions by Multiple, Indirect Octopaminergic and Glutamatergic Signaling Pathways

Mammalian visceral muscles are indirectly regulated by receptors expressed in peripheral neurons and other non-contractile cells. The complex interactions between these pathways remain poorly understood. It also remains unknown whether invertebrates use pathways similar to mammals to indirectly regulate visceral contractility. To elucidate the principles of organization for the signaling pathways responsible for visceral motility and the more general logic of aminergic neuromodulation, we are using the Drosophila oviposition circuit. We find that the receptors for the adrenergic neurotransmitter octopamine as well as the metabotropic glutamate receptor are not expressed in muscle cells, but rather, in epithelial cells that line the oviduct lumen in a regionally specific pattern and in multiple subtypes of peripheral neurons, some of which co-express mechanosensory markers. We have used live imaging to demonstrate that most of the functional effects of octopamine and glutamate are mediated by indirect pathways and that contractions of the lateral and common oviducts are regulated independently. Neurons intrinsic to the lateral oviduct indirectly activate muscle cells, and mutational and optogenetic analyses indicate that Octβ2 is required for these effects. An additional indirect pathway for lateral oviduct contractions is controlled by glutamate receptors expressed on a distinct subset of neuronal processes outside of the lateral oviduct. In addition to contractions of the lateral oviduct, octopamine regulates dilation, but this occurs in both the lateral and common oviducts and is blocked by mutation of OAMB but not Octβ2. Additional, unsuspected interactions between octopamine and glutamate include contractions of the common oviduct that requires an interaction between octopamine and with glutamate, blockade of lateral oviduct contractions by preincubation with glutamate and opposing effects of octopamine and glutamate in epithelial cells. These data indicate that multiple indirect pathways regulate the oviposition circuit similar to the mechanisms described for mammalian visceral muscles. They also uncover a complex network of neuromodulatory effects that provide insight into the regulation of behavioral circuits in other systems.

СТРУКТУРА ПРОГРАММНОГО ПРОДУКТА ДЛЯ СЕМАНТИЧЕСКОГО АНАЛИЗА ТЕКСТОВОЙ ИНФОРМАЦИИ

The article is devoted to the development of software for semantic text analysis. Describes the General logic of the developed web application, which implements the classification of textual information by previously predefined semantic categories. This article provides usage and deployment diagrams, as well as a General diagram of the algorithm. The methods implemented in the app allow you to increase the speed of processing text information. The use of the developed software product allows you to quickly process text information of any content, as well as conduct a deeper semantic analysis of the text. The implemented method is relevant in many areas of activity where you have to work with text information: monitoring of emotional mood towards the company, marketing, social network analysis.

CELLULAR AUTOMATON WITH PERCOLATION AS A DYNAMIC SYSTEM: ENTROPY APPROACH

A model of information confrontation based on a two-dimensional percolation-cellular automaton on a closed oriented surface is constructed and implemented programmatically. Numerical experiments were performed. A theorem on the finiteness of a completely positive topological entropy of a given cellular automaton is formulated and proved. As an applied application of the constructed automaton, a retrospective forecast of the results of the Russian Presidential election in 2018 was made both in Russia as a whole and in two regions of Russia. The General logic of using the automaton was as follows. At the preparatory stage, a model of the region was built, which is a field of a cellular automaton. In the case of regions, anamorphic mapping was used, in which each territorial-administrative unit is represented by a certain number of cells that occupy a connected area of the field of the automaton; the areas of these areas are proportional to the number of voters, and if possible, geographical neighbors are preserved. The color of the cell corresponds to a certain political position; for example, if a certain city has 60% support for the President, then this percentage of cells in that city is red. As initial data for the calculation, the results of sociological surveys on support for the current President conducted 6-12 months before the election were taken; the dynamics of the system is modeled using a cellular automaton; for the formed stationary solution, the shares of cells corresponding to the number of supporters and opponents of the President, as well as non-appearance, are calculated; these shares are taken as a forecast of election results. Those constructed in this way showed significantly lower accuracy than forecasts made using standard sociological methods in the last days before the election. However, they can be used for early forecasting. The reason for this difference is that the opinions of voters immediately prior to elections are determined by campaign, and long before the election - the prevalence and embeddedness of value orientations, which is incorporated in the model.

Turning biases into hypotheses through method: A logic of scientific discovery for machine learning

Machine learning (ML) systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential reasoning through analyzing large data sets, thereby potentially facilitating more informed decision-making. However, a hindrance to such use of ML systems is that the predictive models created through ML are often complex, opaque, and poorly understood, even if the programs “learning” the models are simple, transparent, and well understood. ML models become difficult to trust, since lay-people, specialists, and even researchers have difficulties gauging the reasonableness, correctness, and reliability of the inferences performed. In this article, we argue that bridging this gap in the understanding of ML models and their reasonableness requires a focus on developing an improved methodology for their creation. This process has been likened to “alchemy” and criticized for involving a large degree of “black art,” owing to its reliance on poorly understood “best practices”. We soften this critique and argue that the seeming arbitrariness often is the result of a lack of explicit hypothesizing stemming from an empiricist and myopic focus on optimizing for predictive performance rather than from an occult or mystical process. We present some of the problems resulting from the excessive focus on optimizing generalization performance at the cost of hypothesizing about the selection of data and biases. We suggest embedding ML in a general logic of scientific discovery similar to the one presented by Charles Sanders Peirce, and present a recontextualized version of Peirce’s scientific hypothesis adjusted to ML.

The Russo-Turkish Wars in Russian Literature: Axiological Priorities in Historical Dynamics

The paper represents the experience of analytical description of the fictional discourse, which captures the chronicle of the long-lasting military confrontation between the Russian Empire and the Sublime Porta. The author pursues the goal to trace the logic of evaluative dynamic specific to the Russian literary tradition in the perception and reflection of the events of the Russo-Turkish wars. The material of the paper is a sufficiently voluminous corpus of literary and journalistic texts, most fully and clearly representing the wide range and variability of axiological attitudes of participants of the XVI–XIX centuries national literary process who responded to these events. Among them are such iconic names for Russian intellectual and artistic culture as M.V. Lomonosov, G.R. Derzhavin, A.F. Veltman, A.A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, M.P. Pogodin, N.A. Nekrasov, A.N. Pleshcheev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, V.M. Garshin and many others. As a result, the author concludes that the nearly four-century history of the Russo-Turkish wars provided rich material for creative initiatives of Russian writers and significantly influenced the development of the Russian literary process. Reacting swiftly to the events of numerous military conflicts, fiction produced and clearly demonstrated ideological and axiological priorities of public consciousness from the perspective of their historical dynamics. The general logic of the Russian-Turkish confrontation theme development was directly expressed at the level of poetics in artistic creations. Comparing the early literary experiences of understanding and depicting military conflicts, one can observe a general movement from the general to the particular, from the collective to the individual, from direct evaluation to complex ethical collisions. As artistic consciousness develops, depictions of large-scale battle scenes give way to literary sketches of inner experiences, psychological and existential perspectives replace the external perspective of describing events. The perception of the war is gradually, but more distinctly reveals through the prism of the personal consciousness of an author and his character and is perceived as a personally lived meaningful experience.

«Поворот к онтологии» в неокантианстве (П. Наторп и Э. Ласк)

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the intellectual situation within neo-Kantianism began to change: there were philosophical projects attempting to overcome the total domination of epistemology in Neo-Kantian doctrines and making place for ontology. Ontological tendencies are typical mainly for P. Natorps’s projects of general logic and E. Lask’s logic of philosophy. I analyze the continuity of Natorp’s early epistemological ideas, developed in the spirit of the Marburg interpretation of Kant’s transcendentalism, and his later ideas, focused on speculative ontological constructions. In particular, I investigate the methodo­logical relationship between the characteristics of knowledge in his early and late philo­sophy: dynamism, creativity, categoriality, unity of the starting point and the goal. The ba­sic structure of Natorps’s project of general logic is reconstructed. Lask’s main texts re­veal the provisions that open the way to an ontological turn. These factors include a cri­tique of the identification of the realm of value and that of the extrasensory in the meta­physics of the past, the postulation of a prereflexive stage of knowledge, interpreting the doctrine of judgment as a doctrine of immanent sense, and treating truth as a con­stitutive-aleteological phenomenon. Both Neo-Kantian philosophers build their systems on an on­tological foundation, making subjectivity dependent on objectivity in cognition, which can be interpreted as a kind of retreat from Kantian criticism. The ontological basis is ex­pressed in the postulation of a universal character of the logical expressed in Natorp’s idea of “poiesis” and Lask’s idea of “panarchy of the Logos”. The analysis of Natorp’s and Lask’s onto-epistemological projects allows us to clarify and reveal the role of Neo-Kantianism in the formation of the new ontologies of the 20th century a.k.a. the “ontologi­cal turn”.

РОЗВИТОК ШКОЛИ ДЕЛІКТНОГО ПРАВА В УНІВЕРСИТЕТІ СВЯТОГО ВОЛОДИМИРА – КИЇВСЬКОМУ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОМУ УНІВЕРСИТЕТІ ІМЕНІ ТАРАСА ШЕВЧЕНКА

The paper deals with a research of Tort law school development in St. Volodymyr's University – Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The purpose of the research is to analyse the development of the Tort law school and to study the main trends and key directions of the development. The author applied lots of different research methods, among which were historical and legal method (for the analysis of the works from the past), analysis and synthesis (for stating the peculiarities of the research approaches in different studies' periods). Also, such methods as philosophy methods (dialectic and hermeneutic), general research methods (systemic and structural-functional), general logic methods (induction and deduction, analogy, abstraction, generalization, formalization, and modelling) were used. The topic of civil torts was interesting for the researchers from Kyiv University law school any time while the depth of interest and research approaches differed depending on the historical period. Before the revolution of 1917 the researchers mostly looked on the torts as on the type of civil obligation and the reward for damage caused. No one treated the torts from the standpoint of a type of civil liability at that time. The Soviet period of the Tort law School development was characterized by a change of the research vector. The researchers started focusing on civil torts as liability rather than civil obligations. Tort liability is a type of civil liability and the latter is a type of legal liability. That causes a regime when the researchers (some well-known names of that time are: Gennadiy Matveev, Yuriy Matveev, Dina Bobrova, Yaroslavna Shevchenko etc.) mostly analyse civil tort as a civil liability. They focused their attention on the foundations and the conditions of tort liability. Precisely at that time, the theory of "civil wrong compound" as the main foundation of civil liability appeared. Independent Ukraine spawned a new pleiad of researchers whose research interest was civil torts. Modern civil law doctrine started refusing the understanding of civil tort as a type of civil liability. It comes back to the tort as a type of obligation. Moreover, modern researchers look on the tort's issues much wider – through the prism of legal regulation mechanism. Constantly, modern researchers of Taras Shevchenko National University Law School pay great attention to the new topical spheres of torts, particularly to non-pecuniary damage compensation, damage compensation caused by the State and State agencies and product liability together with digital product liability. Keywords: tort, civil liability, damage compensation, history of legal research, scientific school.

ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕННО-ВРЕМЕННЫХ ПАРАМЕТРОВ АУДИОВИЗУАЛЬНЫХ ОБРАЗОВ В ПРОЦЕССЕ СОЗДАНИЯ ЭКРАННЫХ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЙ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ФОТОГРАФИИ, КИНО, ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ, ВИДЕО

On-screen creativity is a single cultural-aesthetic system, operating with the language of visual and audiovisual images, the basic source of which is inseparably linked with such categories of reality as space and time. Their special position is determined by the fact that they are attributes of the existence of life forms and without their reflection any on-screen creativity becomes impossible. At certain stages of its historical evolution, screen creativity grew by new typical formations. The photography appeared first, then the cinema, and later on television, in the depths of which, after a while, the video was parted. Each new type at the level of space-time relations with the reality preceeding the camera formed its own special principles of screen narration. At the same time, they depended on the features of the new technological system, and on the dominant modes of visuality on an individual and collective levels. In this process, the cultural-aesthetic progress in on-screen creativity was reflected. The general logic of the relationship of the author of the screen work and the displayed reality in terms of its on-screen chronotope organization has evolved from a single, instantaneous discretization of it, to a total space-time continuity. From the author’s point of view, the more speculative picture of this process looked as follows: the photographic chronotope is characterized by a single spatial appearance of the displayed object and its temporary immobility (static); the cinematic chronotope is characterized by an editorial multiplicity of forms of the displayed object, which recreates conditional space and conditional time on the screen; the television chronotope is characterized by a simultaneous multiplicity of forms of the displayed object, which recreates the conditional space and real time on the screen; the video chronotype is characterized by a continual multiplicity of shapes of the displayed object, which recreates real space and real time on the screen. It is obvious that the evolution of screen creativity stimulated the development of new creative possibilities in terms of the spatial and temporal organization of audiovisual images, which in turn contributed to the establishment and enrichment of specific cultural aesthetic formations. Their common aspiration was focused on achieving natural integrity and authenticity in presenting life forms on the screen.

Негативная допустимость доказательств в публично-правовых судебных спорах: размышления о реализации властных полномочий публичных органов применительно к процессу доказывания

We consider the issues of the implementation of certain public authorities in relation to a future judicial dispute. We define the boundaries of use of additional evidentiary tools through the prism of the powers vested in other (non-parties in a particular court case) public entities. We substantiate the applicability of the general rule on negative admissibility, we highlight special cases when evidence previously obtained by an authority that does not have the status of a person participating in the case could still be submitted to a court case initiated on a dispute involving a public authority. The general logic of the proposed approach can be applied both to a procedural private opponent when he received “reinforcement” due to the actions of another authority, and can also be used for private law disputes. We conclude that the absence in the current Russian legislation of any norms that build in-tersectoral relations with regard to the institution of negative admissibility of evidence obtained by other authorities not only generates contradictions in judicial practice, but also in a certain sense discredits the adversarial judicial procedure itself and discourages public authorities, which begin to operate with special tools to combat socially dangerous acts in “ordinary” court cases.

Beyond Recognition: Badiou’s Mathematics of Bodily Incorporation

In Being and Event, Alain Badiou disconnects the infinite from the One and the Absolute, thus recasting the basis from which to craft a new theory of generic subject, the existence of which is demonstrated through set theory. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou turns his attention to the modes by which this subject appears in a world. It does so by being incorporated as a subjectivizable body, a body of truth. As opposed to Being and Event, the demonstration of this argument takes shape according to two distinct levels, that of a “calculated phenomenology” and that of a formalism in which category theory provides a general logic, the combination of which delineates an “onto-logic”. In this essay, we trace Badiou’s derivation of the notion of body of truth and evaluate the innovative phenomenological methodology applied to explain its association with a world.

Современное университетское образование: административно-бюрократический произвол и его следствия

The article considers two interrelated problems of modern Russian higher education: the strengthening of administrative coercion and control as well as the introduction of distance education. As a theoretical and methodological basis of the study, the authors rely on the socio-philosophical analysis of the problems of education in the famous S.I. Hessen’s work, where three basic principles of the effective functioning of the university are highlighted: the completeness of scientific knowledge, the freedom of teaching and learning, and self-government. The authors substantiate the view that at present all these principles are violated. Violation of the first of them is manifested in a decrease in hours devoted to the teaching of fundamental disciplines and in a general orientation toward the graduation of a “narrow” specialist; the second principle is incompatible with the extremely increased reporting of universities and overly formalized indicators of the quality of their work. Violation of the third principle is manifested in the gradual elimination of university autonomy, in particular, free election of rectors. The most negative manifestation of administrative pressure, according to the authors, today is the forced introduction of distance learning. The authors critically analyze the main arguments put forward in favor of this project: saving university budgets, ensuring a higher quality of teaching, the need to follow the general logic of modernization of education as a whole. The solution to financial problems, according to the authors, should not be based on forced economy, but on the competent organization of the country’s economic life. An appeal to a higher quality of teaching, which, it is argued, must be provided by teachers from the country’s central universities, is based on biased and unproven ideas. In addition, for mastering critical and systematic thinking skills, conducting scientific discussions, direct communication between teachers and students is necessary, which is not feasible in the conditions of online teaching with a very large number of students. In addition, the authors highlight the idea that nobody takes into account the need for close knowledge of a particular audience by a teacher to choose an adequate style of lecturing or conducting practical classes. The article concludes that the current administrative-bureaucratic style of managing higher education, in which not only the basic principles of the successful functioning of the latter are violated, but also destructive reforms are carried out, is destructive not only for education as such, but also for the state itself.