СОВМЕСТНЫЙ ПРОЕКТ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФИЛОСОФСКОЙ ОБЩЕСТВЕННОСТИ И ИЗДАТЕЛЬСТВА «СИДИПРЕСС»

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THE RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHICAL GAZETTE

June 2010 – No 6

FEATURES

Oswald Spengler: “Our gift is that of foreseeing our future.”

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations. After Decline was published in 1918, Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism in 1920, in which he argued for an organic, nationalist version of socialism and authoritarianism. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. The National Socialists held Spengler as an intellectual precursor but he was ostracised after 1933 for his pessimism about Germany and Europe's future, his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority, and his critical work The Hour of Decision.

BY NATALIYA LOGINOVA

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Religion as a School Subject Must Be Secular in Character

 

From this year onwards our secondary schools are to teach religious and secular ethic subjects. As is known, this decision gave rise to intense discussion and argument, sometimes violent and irreconcilable. The dispute is still going on. Opponents say that all direct references and allusions to foreign experience in general and the fact that theology is taught in the West’s many educational institutions fall short of being convincing. They hold that Russia is so very distinct because of its multinational and multiconfessional character that the mechanistic transfer of someone’s experience is likely to do more harm than good. Under the circumstances, we have turned to Aleksandr Chubaryan, RAS Member and director of the World History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1988 to comment on that matter.

 

 

INTERVIEW BY SERGEI SHARAKSHANE

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Philosophy is for Intellectual and Moral Health

 

Today is the epoch of radical changes both in the world and our country; it is the time of the deep reappraisal of spiritual values which means that we lose old intellectual values and acquire new ones. Among other things, it is the time of total privatization and mutual isolation that often go together with total lack of respect and increasing egoism, both individual and corporate. Under the present circumstances, reason and consciousness in today’s Russia can serve a basis for countering the new evil. To make this basis viable, people should raise concerns and do something about their intellectual and moral health which is the indicator and criterion of their physical, psychic and mental viability. The article has been contributed by Doctor Khrustalev, a prominent Russian scientist, professor at the I.M.Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy.

BY YURI KHRUSTALEV

 

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Society v Corruption: Putting up a Resistance

 

This is the ending of the article carried in the RPhG April issue and it is indeed worth reading because it is well-thought, substantive and above all original. It is focused on the urgent need to adopt a very special document – proposed and written by the author – the so called Doctrine of Russia that would be a package of public-relevant worthwhile principles and provisions that would reflect the attitude of Russian people to themselves as a nation, their own state and the world as a whole. The author believes that such a doctrine would serve a good legal basis for fighting corruption. The text of the Doctrine is indeed of extreme interest from any point of view.

 

BY OLGA CHERNYSHENKO

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An Honest Functionary – a Graft-free Country

The extract comes as a follow-up to our coverage of the theoretical projects done for this year’s philosophical project contest on the general subject of countering corruption. In general terms, the author views corruption as an economic phenomenon and suggests that it should be fought with using economic methods. The value of this paper lies in that it sets forth the guidelines for fighting corruption and, more importantly, proposes clear-cut measures to be taken if we are serious in our desire to deal with the problem. The author believes that the proposals set forth herein can be implemented experimentally in some of Russia’s constituent entities and then if the result proves positive in the upshot, they can be made use of nationwide.

BY EKATERINA EFIMOVA

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A Night Flight over the Planet of the People

The Little Prince? Why, of course, it’s the story Antoine de Saint-Exupery is best known for. It’s about a Boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant and many other things including but not limited to philosophical and moral. It has been claimed that The Little Prince is the best-selling book after the Bible and Karl Marx's Das Kapital. He is also remembered for his books about aviation adventures, including Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

After the fall of France in World War II Saint-Exupery joined the army, and made several daring flights. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre. On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupery took off from an airstrip in Sardinia on a recce flight over southern France. His plane disappeared – he was either shot down over the Mediterranean, or perhaps there was an accident. Saint-Exupery’s plane, Lockheed Lightning P-38, was found only in May 2000, but the wreckage shed little light upon the mystery of his death. In 1998, a fisherman found Saint-Exupery's bracelet from the sea, 150 kilometers west from Marseilles. His and his wife's names were recognized from it. Read the article to learn more.

 

BY VLADIMIR ROTSCHUPKIN

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Man’s Will and the Topic of Nano-technology

Nano-technology has recently become a buzzword and for a good reason. The fields of knowledge upon which nano-technologies are based are well-known: quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and molecular biology. It is the development of those sciences that has gradually and inconspicuously turned the formerly fundamental disciplines into the fields of applied science, into a genuinely applied industry destined to do practical tasks. Thus, the new thing about nano-technology is that at a certain point in time the amount of knowledge accumulated over the past years became sufficient for setting and achieving practical goals. But in a word, what we have here is the transition “from science to business”. It is about this transition that the article is about.

 

BY EVGENI ANDRYUSHIN

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