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THE RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHICAL GAZETTE

February 2008 – No 2

FEATURES

Francois-Marie Voltaire, “Prejudice is the reason of fools”

Voltaire... feared and hated by Church, revered by kings and queens. His great contemporaries and followers called him the Teacher of Enlightenment. ‘We haven’t missed anything of what Voltaire wrote for us’, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau who held him in great esteem. Our great poet Aleksandr Pushkin echoed him, calling Voltaire ‘a mastermind and a trend setter’. Voltaire’s God was probably Truth itself otherwise he couldn’t have said, “I detest what you say, but I will give my life defending your right to say it.” What kind of man was Voltaire, one of the greatest minds of the 18th century?

BY NATALIA LOGINOVA

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"And you, my friends, no matter your positions, will never be musicians!"

The title – a concluding line from the famous fable by Ivan Krylov – gives a perfect insight into the relations of the society and its government. These relations have historically been problematic. In spite of the efforts taken by many thinkers to explain the essence of the matter, it is far from being clear.

Just like tectonic plates in the Earth crust, the society and its government have periodically collided causing great tensions in the society, though it is the society itself that has always initiated changes of power. Then why does a change in state order in many communities result in the situation described in the fable? Why does not a reshuffle in the government lead to a qualitative improvement in the whole regime? There is no scientific theory to create an optimal social administration system – a system to operate for the benefit of all the people. Some states do manage to provide a quiet life for its citizens for some periods of time, but even there conflicts develop for different reasons, showing that the truth about social government is far from being discovered.

BY ARNOLD KAZMIN

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English

Spiritualization of Life

The ‘spiritualization of life’ – this is how ancient philosophers called the process of personal development which allowed the right combination of reason and emotion. Our contemporary, philosopher Arnold Kazmin calls it ‘intellect’ discarding the habitual understanding of the word as just a certain set of knowledge and an elementary ability to think rationally and giving it a far broader meaning embracing the ability to think as the primary characteristic of an individual with intellect which means his capability of making a choice based on both reason and morality. Here we have the ability to chose between disgrace and honor, heroism and treason, good and evil, and finally between life and death, i.e. a quality that should be inherent in a statesman. So what are the conditions that can help a human being to develop into a reasonable and moral personality?

BY NATALIYA LOGINOVA

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Scientists’ Concern Over Clericalization of Russia

The opposition to the open letter of ten Russian academicians to President Putin that clearly shows their concern over the clericalization of secondary education and the broad offensive the Church has launched recently aiming to gradually win in all spheres of social life are obviously very alarming signals urging science to come out jointly and say ‘no’ to clericalization. There is little doubt that introducing religion as a school subject will result in numerous and serious violations of the principle of the freedom of conscience and thus the Russian Constitution. Such yielding to Church is definitely wrong because it is a violation of the fundamental principle of democracy which is the separation of church and state, school and religion. Besides this would also set up a barrier for scientific research in many spheres such as human cloning, for example, and so on. Therefore time is right to defend the interests of the society for the benefit of scientific knowledge.

BY IGOR VISHEV

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I wish I could learn Russian…

The year that passed was the year of the Russian language. As is known, Russian has been one of the four UN working languages since 1945. It is also lingua franca in the former Soviet republics. Nor is it yet forgotten in Eastern Europe. The Russian language being the tongue of Pushkin and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Sholokhov, Florensky and Vernadsky is a subject of incessant interest in China, Germany, Sri Lanka, Norway and many other countries.  This article is just a brush stroke to generally outline today’s standing of the Russian language.

BY VLADIMIR TIMOFEYEV

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Humanistic Biology

The article sheds light on humanistic biology as a new science which embraces all the contributions of modern knowledge of living organisms to social sciences and liberal arts. It may be interesting to know that it is conceptually based on the co-evolution strategy which brings together the evolution of biosphere and the historical development of mankind and includes the studies of biophilosophy,  biopolitics, bioethics, bioaesthetics, biosemiotics, as well as biosophy and general ecology. The role of humanistic biology runs high as ultimately it is aimed at saving the world as a whole. Meanwhile its immediate objective is to instill in the younger generation the idea that it should live in accordance with the bioethical code which governs the interrelation between humanity and the rest of the living world.

BY A.OLESKIN, E.R.KARTASHOVA

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Once Again About the Meaning of Life

This is yet another reflection on the eternal question that man has been asking himself since times immemorial. Not only does it bring together the views of such thinkers as Abraham Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vladimir Vernadsky, but also presents a new idea based on identifying the meaning of life with the functional process of transformation of biological energy into psychological and then into spiritual or creative. This new understanding accentuates the possibility of making one’s life meaningful in two ways: conscious – through creative activities; and unconscious – through day-to-day deeds related to the traditional understanding of the meaning of life (work, family children, homeland, nation, mankind) and thus introduces two new concepts: direct meaning and quasi meaning of life. There is also strong emphasis on the social aspect of the notion in question.

BY A.GORELOV

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A Man from Planet Earth

This is a story about Nicolaus Copernicus whose name we have known since we went to school. This great Polish astronomer is credited with making a revolution in natural science and thus in the minds of people. In Copernicus' time most astronomers believed the theory the Greek astronomer Ptolemy had developed more than 1,000 years earlier. Ptolemy said the Earth was the center of the Universe and was motionless. He believed all other heavenly bodies moved in complicated patterns around the Earth. Copernicus felt that Ptolemy’s theory was incorrect and he first circulated the principles of his heliocentric astronomy. Copernicus' observations of the heavens were made with the naked eye. He died more than fifty years before Galileo became the first person to study the skies with a telescope. From his observations, Copernicus concluded that every planet, including Earth, revolved around the Sun. He also determined that the Earth rotates daily on its axis and that the Earth's motion affected what people saw in the heavens. Copernicus did not have the tools to prove his theories. By the 1600s, astronomers such as Galileo would develop the physics that would prove he was correct.

BY YULIA NIKOLAEVA

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Heat from Cold Numbers

It is often shocking what inventiveness and imagination some people show from time to time trying to give this or that phenomenon a mystical sense. One can understand them at least when they speculate about certain natural phenomena that have so far defied explanation. For example, the birth of astrology was well in the order of things as people lacked in knowledge about the surrounding world. This article deals with a related pseudo science, i.e. numerology, and some superstitions based on numbers. 

BY ANTON SMIRNOV

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