Andrew Schumann

This article examines one of the most significant trajectories in the reception of the existential philosophy of Lev Shestov in the USSR. His principal successor in the Soviet context was Yakov Druskin, who developed a distinctive practice of phenomenological reduction that extended Shestov’s notion of the “apotheosis of groundlessness” through the poeticization of experience. This approach was realized in practice by the Chinari, a circle associated with OBERIU. During the period of the Khrushchev Thaw, the works of the Chinari experienced a revival and gained renewed attention. At the same time, in Minsk, a group of samizdat poets emerged who may be understood as a case of intellectual convergence: independently and without direct influence, they rediscovered and rearticulated the phenomenological reduction developed by Druskin and the Chinari, but within the specific context of Belarusian culture. These authors are now referred to as the Minsk School of Poetry—non-Soviet poets of the Belarusian samizdat. This development is particularly significant given that, during the same period, official philosophy in the Belarusian SSR largely took the form of a colonial discourse shaped by intellectual centers in Moscow and Leningrad. Alongside this, an unofficial but widespread Soviet New Age milieu also influenced a number of Belarusian authors, particularly those engaged in pseudoscientific theorizing. Against this backdrop, the Minsk School of Poetry stands out as the non-Soviet and noncolonial form of philosophical expression in Soviet Belarus, articulating a version of existentialism closely aligned with that of Shestov and Druskin. The study of this school is therefore of considerable importance for the broader project of decolonizing the philosophical and literary legacy of the BSSR.

This paper explores the relationship between legal argumentation and totalitarianism by examining the legal systems of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It critically assesses Gustav Radbruch’s thesis which suggests that Nazi Germany adhered to a system of legal positivism, asserting that laws were governed by logical rules of inference. The paper challenges this view, arguing that legal theorists in Nazi Germany, including Carl Schmitt and others, rejected legal argumentation in favor of party loyalty and ideological conformity. Similarly, Soviet law under Marxism–Leninism substituted legal reasoning with political conviction. Both systems, though differing in ideological content, shared a disregard for legal argumentation, resulting in unjust laws that served the interests of the ruling party. The paper also distinguishes between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, showing how, in totalitarian societies, legal norms are subordinated to political ideology, leading to a collapse of objective legal reasoning. In authoritarian systems, laws may imitate democratic principles but fail in practice due to a breakdown in the logical consistency of legal argumentation. This emphasizes that legal systems devoid of argumentation undermine justice and legal certainty, regardless of whether they exist under totalitarian or authoritarian regimes.

This paper proposes a novel approach to Stoic and Aristotelian–Epicurean modal reasoning by replacing traditional Kripkean relational semantics with a topological framework. In the Stoic account, causality and modality are associated with the density of a space, whereas in the Epicurean tradition they are grounded in discreteness and atomic structure. Motivated by this distinction, we argue that causality and modality can be interpreted through the topology of neighborhoods: the Stoic framework corresponds to a density-based notion of logical determinism, while the Aristotelian–Epicurean framework corresponds to a discreteness-based notion of logical contingency. This perspective allows modal operators to be defined via limit-point and interior structures, rather than Kripke's accessibility relations. Also, to capture Stoic logical reasoning, we introduce the notion of logemes, which we model geometrically as simplicial complexes. This representation reflects the flexible, non-linear, and competitive character of ancient inference rules. The proposed topological interpretation not only clarifies the internal structure of Stoic logic but also enables systematic comparison with Aristotelian and Epicurean modal frameworks. In addition, the Stoic interpretation of modality admits concrete applications in data analysis: in particular, it leads to the construction of modal filters that implement a deterministic, topology-based mechanism for noise rejection.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of logemes, a novel framework for reasoning that bridges nontrivial fragments of formal logic and topological spaces. Logemes are defined as logic diagrams that capture logical relationships relevant to specific datasets or problems. Unlike standard symbolic logic, which emphasizes completeness and formal validation within an algebraic framework, logemes focus on pragmatic, nontrivial subsets of inference rules tailored to real-world reasoning tasks. This approach builds on historical tools like logic diagrams (e.g. the square of opposition) while leveraging the combinatorial and topological richness of simplicial complexes. The paper explores the interplay between syntax and semantics through logemes, using topology to compare logical fragments across different systems. By focusing on structural properties rather than syntactic or semantic details, logemes reveal deeper similarities and differences between reasoning patterns, even when derived from distinct logical frameworks. The narrative alternates between bottom-up and top-down approaches: starting with basic components to build complex systems and simplifying complete systems into manageable fragments. Finally, logemes are connected to homotopy types, positioning them as a bridge between reasoning and topology. This unified framework offers a modular, flexible tool for studying logical fragments. By grounding reasoning in the topology of simplicial complexes, logemes provide a novel paradigm for analysing datasets and logical systems.

This paper proposes a phenomenological approach to philosophical logic by reexamining the overlooked yet deeply insightful position of Zaremba in his historical dispute with leading Polish logicians of the early 20th century. Rather than treating this debate as a closed chapter, we argue that Zaremba’s critique remains highly relevant for understanding the limits of formal logic and the need for a more structurally sensitive model of reasoning. His emphasis on the relational and contextual nature of logic challenges the formalist vision of mathematics as a system reducible to axioms. To address this challenge, we introduce a formal mathematical language designed to represent and analyze logemes – the minimal, context-dependent units of logical reasoning. This framework employs simplicial complexes as a topological structure to model how local fragments of reasoning interconnect. Each vertex represents a basic proposition, while higher-dimensional simplices capture the logical relations among them, forming coherent yet flexible substructures. This approach makes it possible to represent interactions among diverse logical systems (such as classical and intuitionistic logic) in a unified, geometrically intuitive manner. By modeling logic not as a unified system but as a dynamic network of interrelated fragments, this work offers a new foundation for philosophical logic – one that is capable of expressing ambiguity, incompleteness, and contextual variation, and that aligns more closely with the actual structure of mathematical and human reasoning. This approach may have a wide and rich range of practical applications in artificial intelligence. It provides a universal representation of databases in the form of logemes, as well as universal models for non-monotonic reasoning. Together, these features make it possible to model key phenomena of consciousness, such as context sensitivity, revision of beliefs, and circularity. By offering a mathematically rigorous framework for non-monotonicity, the approach opens new possibilities for integrating logical, topological, and cognitive structures in AI systems, potentially contributing to more flexible, adaptive, and cognitively plausible models of artificial intelligence.

Knocking on Heaven's Door is the oldest human dream that seems unrealized still. Religious discourse does show the road, but it requires a blind faith in return. In this book logicians try to hear Heaven's Call and to analyze religious discourse. As a result, the notion of religious logic as a part of philosophical logic is introduced. Its tasks are (1) to construct consistent logical systems formalizing religious reasoning that at first sight seems inconsistent (this research is fulfilled within the limits of modal logic, paraconsistent logic and many-valued logic), (2) to carry out an illocutionary analysis of religious discourse (this research is fulfilled in frames of illocutionary logics), and (3) to formalize Ancient and Medieval logical theories used in the theology of an appropriate religion (they could be studied within the limits of unconventional logics, such as non-monotonic logics, non-well-founded logics, etc.).

According to logical psychologism that was popular in the nineteenth century, logic was regarded as a natural ability of human psychology. Consequently, logical competence as a realization of logic knowledge was treated as one of the innate features of human thinking. Nevertheless, within cognitive science, it was experimentally proved that our thinking is not free from cognitive biases, and to the same extent, our reasoning is not free from logical fallacies. Hence, we are forced to consciously clear the thinking of possible distortions to follow logical norms and to realize logical competence thereby. In the paper, it is shown that some cognitive biases are observed even at the level of cellular reactions to the environment and then at the level of animal behavior. Therefore not logic, but cognitive biases are a natural (biological) mechanism of human thinking. So, the problem of defining logical competence arises. In this paper, there are some arguments that logical competence has once appeared as an especial social practice and it has then been developed for a long time before the first treatises on logic.

The interview given by Adam Hlobus (Uladzimir Vyachaslavavich Adamchyk, born September 29, 1958), a Belarusian writer, poet, artist, and publisher. He began publishing poetry in 1981 (in the newspaper Literature and Art and the magazine Maladosts). He is the founder of the Society of Young Writers “Tuteyshiya” (1986–1988). Selected books: Park (poetry, 1988), Loneliness at the Stadium (short stories, 1989), Death Is a Man (1992), Crossroads (1993), Damavikameron (1994), Just Don’t Tell My Mom (1995), Koidanava (1997), New Damavikameron (1998), Post Scriptum (1999), Texts (a collection of all previous books, 2000), Braslav Stigmata (2001), Notebooks (2003), Home (2005), coParticipants (2006), Letters (2006), Fairy Tales (2007), Convolutus (2008), Castle (2008), PLAY.BY (2009), Krutahory Fairy Tales (2010), New Sky (2010), Sayings (2012), Names. Literary Portraits (2013), Fairy Tales for Adults (2013), Portraits (2014), Stories about Minsk and Its Surroundings (2015), Reverse Perspective (2016), Family (2017), Capital Fairy Tales (2018), Features (2019), Angel (2021), Snowflake (2022), Our Neighbor Karatkevich (2025).

The interview given by Gershon Trestman (born July 29, 1947, Minsk), a Russian-language Belarusian and Israeli poet, prose writer, publicist, and playwright. He is a member of the Union of Writers of Israel, the Commonwealth of Russian-Speaking Writers of Israel “Stolitsa,” and the International Federation of Russian Writers. His work has been recognized with the Yu. Stern and Yu. Nagibin awards, as well as a gold medal for “outstanding achievements in literature and the arts” from the California Academy of Sciences. Selected works: The One Who Crossed the River (Tel Aviv, 1996); Golem, or Faust’s Curse (Moscow, 2007); A Small Country with a Great History (Israel, 2008, foreword by Avigdor Lieberman); The Great History of a Small Country (Israel, 2011); The Scroll of Esther (Jerusalem, 2013); The Land of Olive Guardians (Jerusalem, 2013); The Israeli Knot: The History of the Country – The History of Confrontation (Book-Sefer, 2014); The Land of Olive Guardians (Jerusalem, KKL-JNF, 2014); Job (Minsk, New Wineskins, 2014);... Where There Are No Coordinates. Poems and Epics (Jerusalem, 2017); The Book of Non-Being (Minsk, Logvinov, 2019); Alphabet for Elderly Children (Jerusalem, 2023).