• Главная страница
• Новости
• Библиотека
• Контакты
• Архив
• English

English

THE RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHICAL GAZETTE

September 2008 – No 9

FEATURES

Campanella: “The Utopia shall put the world in the right”

Tommaso Campanella (September 5, 1568 – May 21, 1639), an Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet, was a man of perhaps the most extraordinary and universal mind in new philosophy. As is often the case with extraordinary people, his contemporaries failed to know his worth and thus appreciate him both as a philosopher and as a front-line champion of contemporary science who rose to defend Galileo.   Son of a poor and illiterate cobbler, he entered the Dominican Order before age fifteen, taking the name of Tommaso in honour of Thomas Aquinas. Campanella’s life is that of fight and adventure though he spent twenty-seven years in prison. During his detention, he wrote his most important works: The Monarchy in Spain (1600), Political Aforisms (1601),  Triumph over Atheism, (1605-1607), Quod reminiscetur (1606?), Metaphysica (1609-1623), Theologia (1613-1624), The Defense of Galileo (1616), and his most famous work, The City of the Sun (1602-1623). Campanella’s contribution to literature is not as much through his ideas as the deep aesthetical substance of his utopias.

BY NATALIYA LOGINOVA

Read the article in Russian

The State and Philosophy: They Click!

Reliance only on democratic mechanisms to build a system of public governance is insufficient even if such mechanisms are successfully implemented because they, as the world practice shows, do not always ensure the supremacy of moral principles. Thus, banks in leading democracies willingly accept large but apparently precarious private deposits from Russia saying apologetically that they do it for the benefit of Western economies and, consequently, for the development of the very same democracy in question. This article is to show a contradiction in the democratic process viewed as an evolutionary global accent of human thought towards the eminence of decent life.

BY ARNOLD KAZMIN

Read the article in Russian

English

The Results of the 22d World Congress of Philosophy: While the West teaches the world how to live, the East teaches what to live for

The recent events in South Ossetia and those around it have shown how intertwined and fragile the world we live in is, how just one tiny spark may carry the danger of a conflagration. This is another very vocal sign telling us all that we need is an all-embracing philosophical analysis and the comprehension of the realities and tendencies of social development.

The pursuit for such an analysis was in focus of the 22d World Congress of Philosophy held in Seoul in August-September. Now that the Congress is over and the RPhS participants are coming back home, we hope that our readers are anxious to know what philosophical baggage they are carrying with them. This article is both an interview and a synopsis of the work done by this world’s major philosophical forum.

INTERVIEW BY SERGEI SHARAKSHANE

Read the article in Russian

Faith and its Absence in Russian Culture

How can some people of social standing and education are so blind as to believe in something that has no factual basis and take it earnestly for the incontestable truth? Omens, bad dreams, fortune-telling, horoscopes, and all other superstitions do not make the subject of this article. It is religion, its social role, its development both past and future, on the one hand, and atheism, on the other, that are analyzed in it and outlined against the Russian culture. However atheistic and radical the author’s perspective may be, his speculations and conclusions are of extreme interest.

BY ALEKSEI SHABALIN Student, the University of Syktyvkar

Read the article in Russian

“F” to Russian School

The First of September is a day when all Russian boys and girls go to school, some - after their summer holidays, some - for the first or last time in their lives. This repeats year in year out and this cycle reflects the natural run of things: generations come to succeed one another in the relay-race where the baton is our traditions and… life itself.

However the eclogue of the traditional teaching process had come to a point where everyone felt a need for reform. But reforms, as is known, can be good or not so good to put it mildly. This year was the year of the Unified State Examinations (USE) introduced in secondary schools as part of the Russian national project called “Education”. The USE system being a controversy, the article is a good attempt to analyze this year’s USE results and weigh its pros and cons.

BY GENNADIY SHVOV

Read the article in Russian

The Discovery of Antarctica Started with Him

Fabian or Faddei (Thaddeus) von Bellingshausen enlisted as a cadet in the Russian Navy at the age of ten. After graduating from the Kronstadt naval academy at age eighteen, he rose to the rank of captain. He took part in the first Russian circumnavigation of the Earth (1803-1806).

When Tsar Alexander I authorized an expedition to the south polar region in 1819, the authorities selected Bellingshausen to lead it. Leaving Portsmouth on September 5, 1819 with two ships, the 600-ton corvette Vostok and the 530-ton support vessel Mirny (captained by Mikhail Lazarev), the expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle (the first to do so since Cook) on January 26, 1820. On January 28, 1820, the expedition discovered the Antarctic mainland approaching the Antarctic coast at a point with coordinates 69?21'28"S 2?14'50"W and seeing ice-fields there. The point in question lies within twenty miles of the Antarctic mainland. Bellingshausen's diary, his report to the Russian Naval Minister on 21 July 1821 and other documents, available in the Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in Saint Petersburg, Russia, were carefully compared with the log-books of other claimants by the British polar historian A. G. E. Jones in his 1982 study 'Antarctica Observed'. Jones concluded that BELLINGSHAUSEN, rather than the Royal Navy's Edward Bransfield on 30 January 1820 or the American Nathaniel Palmer on 17 November 1820, WAS INDEED THE DISCOVERER of the sought-after TERRA AUSTRALIS or ANTARCTICA.

BY NATALIYA LOGINOVA

Read the article in Russian

Household Electronics and How to Win the Fight Against It

Can you imagine your life without a TV set, a microwave, a computer, a printer, a scanner, a cell phone, an i-pod, a DVD player, let alone a fridge, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a washing machine, a blender or a dish washer?  Are all these things as safe as their manufacturers claim they are? Is LCD harmful? Are we exposed to MW radiation at home? – Well, read this article, which is about our health rather than household appliances, to have answers to these and many other questions you may have.

BY ANTON SMIRNOV

Read the article in Russian