Valentin Bazhanov

This reply draws attention to the importance of taking into account the results of the study of the phenomenon of reflexivity in scientific knowledge, which have been obtained in the domestic philosophical and methodological tradition. We believe that taking this kind of results into account could enrich the analysis of the strong programme in the STS. We touch the origins of reflexive tendencies, the reflexive and non-reflexive in scientific knowledge, personal and transpersonal forms, the types and levels of reflexion in science, as well as denote the mechanisms that allows taking an external position in relation to the subject about which reflexive procedures are carried out (if we mean the interval approach implementation).

The assessment of Soviet logic and philosophy of logic development in the 20th and even the dawn of the twenty-first century shows the tight correlation between state policy towards higher education and the official attitude towards these fields of research. Progressive stages of Russia’s/Soviet State evolvement are marked with positive treatment of logic and philosophy of logic. Reactionary stages may be described in the context of the so-called ideologized science phenomenon, and they are marked by negative treatment of philosophy of logic and even logic as a field of research, stagnation, or, at worst, total abandonment of logical education. This correlation has not been studied well enough. We will fulfill this lacuna from the social studies of science perspective.

The interpretation of the abstraction process and the use of various abstractions are consistent with the trends associated with the naturalistic turn in modern cognitive and neural studies. Logic of dealing with abstractions presupposes not only acts of digress from the insignificant details of the object, but also the replenishment of the image due to idealization, endowing the object with properties that are absent from it. Thus, abstraction expresses not only the activity of the subject but the fact of “locking” this activity on a certain kind of ontology as well. The latter, in the spirit of I. Kant’s apriorism, is a function of epistemological attitudes and the nature of the subject's activity. Therefore, in the context of modern neuroscience, we can mean the transcendentalism of activity type. An effective tool for comprehension of abstractions making and development is a metaphor, which, on the one hand, allows submerge the object of analysis into a more or less familiar context, and on the other hand, it may produce new abstractions. Naturalistic tendencies manifested in the fact that empirically established abstractions activate certain neural brain networks, and abstract and concrete concepts are "processed" by various parts of the brain. If we keep in mind the presence of different levels abstractions then not only neural networks but even individual neurons (called “conceptual”) can be excited. The excitation of neural networks is associated with understanding the meaning of some concepts, but at the same time, the activity of these networks presupposes the "dissection" of reality due to a certain angle, determined in the general case by goals, attitudes and concrete practices of the subject.

The paper deals with the factors which enabled N. A. Vasiliev to put forward in 1910 - 12 the idea of logics free of the laws of contradiction and excluded middle, the idea of metalogic and to construct his imaginary logic as novel non-classical system. It is shown that background of Vasiliev’s ideas lies deeply in Russia’s culture and particular approach to logical discourse. Several Russian scholars expressed ideas similar to Vasiliev’s though not in such explicit form. This period might be called the prehistory of paraconsistency. Real history of paraconsistency starts with N.C.A. da Costa’s works.

The article presents the standpoint that naturalistic tendencies in modern science, which are especially expressed in neuroscience, push up social knowledge toward the need to revise its attitudes and norms, which consist in consistent sociocentrism and biophobia, and, hence, a simplified understanding of the phenomenon of “genetic reductionism”. We show that the application of the methods of natural science to social disciplines often marked visible progress and even conceptual breakthroughs in their development. Achievements of modern neuroscience affect a traditional area of social and humanitarian knowledge as political science, which leads to the formation of an independent area of research – political neuroscience. Through the optics of this research, cognitive styles characteristic of individuals and social groups with different value orientations imply the dominance of certain ideological sympathies and antipathies, which attributed to the opposite poles of the ideological scale – liberalism and conservatism. Considerable empirical material allows us to conclude that these ideological positions are exist due to differences in their ontogenetic “foundations”, which allows us to develop I. Kant's ideas about a priorism and transcendentalism in the context of the Kantian research program in contemporary neuroscience. The result of the implementation of this program to the political sphere was the discovery of the genesis of political views, and the demonstration of the peculiarities of their dynamics. They are based on the difference in the activity of certain neural sets, which in their turn are influenced by culture and society, forming an integral system “brain – culture – society”, where each component of which affects other components. Features and changes in the socio-cultural context of the development of an individual or a group of people may have an effect upon the architectonics of the brain and shift, due to its plasticity, of the political views along the scale of ideologies “liberalism – conservatism”. At the same time, carriers of different cognitive styles and, therefore, with a sufficient degree of probability of ideological views, percept the world in which they live in differently, and evaluate its past and possible future in diverse ways.

The author argues that the decline of philosophical thought and research in Russia is over. He describes the state of present-day philosophy in Russia, its background, and prospects for development citing concrete examples and little known facts. Any survey of the state of the philosophy in post-Communist Russia is a complicated task requiring accuracy and completness. Whether I succeed in this task remains to be seen, although I shall be content if I manage to present a clear picture. It will of course be subjective and reflect my interests and preferences, remaining in this sense quite incomplete. But I aim to present a concise survey, identifying the most important trends, personalities, and topics of discussion. I shall focus on changes with respect to the following issues: 1) the state of research in philosophy, in particular noticeable shifts in problematics, geography, and management; 2) philosophical education, i.e., noticeable development in problematics, approaches, geography, and management. Moreover, I shall examine the origin of these shifts and assess whether they are of a qualitative character.

This paper assesses, from a philosophical point of view, the latest cultural neuroscience results that suggest the traditional interpretation of subject of cognition be essentially reconstructed. We must move from a universalistic interpretation of cognitive process to an interpretation taking into explicit account the socio-cultural context of the subject’s activity, as well as often its biological nature. The principle of cultural and cognitive neurobiological determination of knowledge acquisition is proposed. We claim that subject of cognition is fixed in the historical and cultural context and it neurobiologically determined, and thus classical Kantian transcendentalism should be reconsidered in light of recent neuroscience research.

The interpretation of the abstraction process and the use of various abstractions are consistent with the trends associated with the naturalistic turn in modern cognitive and neural studies. Logic of dealing with abstractions presupposes not only acts of digress from the insignificant details of the object, but also the replenishment of the image due to idealization, endowing the object with properties that are absent from it. Thus, abstraction expresses not only the activity of the subject but the fact of “locking” this activity on a certain kind of ontology as well. The latter, in the spirit of I. Kant’s apriorism, is a function of epistemological attitudes and the nature of the subject's activity. Therefore, in the context of modern neuroscience, we can mean the transcendentalism of activity type. An effective tool for comprehension of abstractions making and development is a metaphor, which, on the one hand, allows submerge the object of analysis into a more or less familiar context, and on the other hand, it may produce new abstractions. Naturalistic tendencies manifested in the fact that empirically established abstractions activate certain neural brain networks, and abstract and concrete concepts are "processed" by various parts of the brain. If we keep in mind the presence of different levels abstractions then not only neural networks but even individual neurons (called “conceptual”) can be excited. The excitation of neural networks is associated with understanding the meaning of some concepts, but at the same time, the activity of these networks presupposes the "dissection" of reality due to a certain angle, determined in the general case by goals, attitudes and concrete practices of the subject.