Vol 27, No 1 (2023): PHILOSOPHY OF V. SESEMANN

In my paper, I give an analytical commentary on Vasily Sesemann’s review of Martin Heidegger's treatise Being and Time (1927) published in the journal entitled The Way in 1928. The aim of this commentary is to evaluate the adequacy of Sesemann’s perception of Heidegger’s thought and the acceptability of his review for today’s reception of the Heideggerian ontological project. In my text, I state that Sesemann accurately fixes the transcendent essence of Heidegger’s ontological investigation, its basic theme and the main stages of its explication. In this regard, the Sesemann’s evaluation of the project of fundamental ontology in Heidegger is much closer to the very idea of this project in comparison to the evaluations of it given by both Edmund Husserl and Nicolai Hartmann. Sesemann also offered several successful or - at least - original translations of Heideggerian terms into Russian. Since he understands the incompleteness of the project, the results of which were presented in the initial divisions of Being and Time, Sesemann remains very far from being able to provide a final judgement about it. And yet, he points out the key achievements of Heidegger: the special significance of the differentiation of the ways of being of Dasein and the inner-worldly entities, emphasis of care-structure, which allows to grasp Dasein in its integrity and systemic essence of Heidegger’s work. I also acknowledge that although the interpretation proposed by Sesemann contains some weaknesses, f.i., the interpretation of Dasein as being-awareness and the neo-Kantian understanding of the systematic essence of the ontology of Heidegger, the review written by Vasily Sesemann is highly keen and may be valid for reception of Heideggerian philosophy up to nowadays.

The article is devoted to two talented representatives of the Russian university philosophical community of the first quarter XX century: Vasily Sesemann and Ksenia Miloradovich. It’s shown that their university routes are very similar, as far as it was possible for male and female biographies of that time. The most complete list of their original works published before 1922 is given. The thematic focus of their publications and journals in which they were published is compared and the translation activity is analyzed. This allows us to see that in publications names of the “youth”: Vasily Sesemann, Ksenia Miloradovich, Sergey Hessen most often are supported by famous philosophers N.O. Lossky and S.E. Radlov. Based on the material of Ksenia Miloradovich's essay about the Philosophical Society, it’s emphasized that they were acquainted with each other in the philosophical workshop. The publications of Miloradovich and Sesemann made in the genre of reviews and not previously mentioned in their personal bibliographies, were revealed. It’s also shown that two historical events: the First World War (1914-1918) and the revolution of 1917 influenced the publishing capabilities of both philosophers. Nevertheless, until 1922 they continued to be active participants in the processes of reviving philosophical publications and the philosophical society. Lives of Sesemann and Miloradovich had the pathos of the drama of political arrests that trimmed their philosophical biographies, but both managed to make their contribution to the history of Russian philosophy. The article emphasizes that the enthusiasm of their creativity and the drama of their destinies can serve as an example of vitality and loyalty to the work.

The manuscript “Self-knowledge, self-consciousness and objectification” is the text of Sesemann’s manuscript collection, Vilnius University (F122-102). The manuscript in the notebook dates from the third quarter of 1954 (Krasnokamsk). The notes were made in ink, some in pencil. The text was written during Sesemann's stay in a labor camp in Taishet (Irkutsk region) in 1950-1955. Due to the limited volume of publications in the journal, only part of Sesemann's text is given.

The article is devoted to the controversy of Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov, the so-called “another Bolshevik”, with Lenin and his associates on the question of the revolution and the ways of building a socialist society and state. It is shown that Bogdanov expressed a critical attitude towards the revolution and its socialist nature, the ability of the proletariat to play a decisive role in it, and wrote about Russia’s unpreparedness for an anti-capitalist coup, thereby expressing a distinctly marked anti-Leninist position. Based on the analysis of a large corpus of Bogdanov’s works, the authors focused their attention on the following aspects of his work relating to the theme of revolution: the contradictions between Bogdanov and Lenin in its interpretation even before October 1917; Bogdanov’s views on the revolution and real socialism after its completion; his interpretation and evaluation of “war communism”; the program for building socialism in the USSR and the search for ways to form fundamentally new social structures developed in the context of the science of tectology, created by him; Bogdanov’s project “Proletkult” and his utopian novels, in which he foresaw how “socialism in one country” would be built and how the transition from the old exploitative to new forms of human coexistence would be carried out, as well as the danger of the degeneration of democracy into a dictatorship.

This article aims to analyze how the so-called ‘pedagogy of work’ attempts to answer the challenges of unemployment and job insecurity characterizing the labor market in contemporary society. The authors reflect on the concepts of nihilist pedagogies and the ‘end of work’ by distinguishing two approaches: an active and a passive nihilist pedagogy. The passive approach, based on resignation, is opposed to an active attitude in which labor pedagogy offers tools to address current challenges. The authors support the idea that pedagogy as a human-improving science cannot adopt the position of passive nihilism in interpreting work in contemporary society. To better understand the dynamics related to job insecurity and corrective solutions by pedagogy, the authors analyzed the thoughts of three contemporary philosophers: Zygmunt Bauman, Jeremy Rifkin, and Dominique Méda. These authors redefined the concept of work in connection with the transformations because of globalization, the advent of new communication technologies, and digital work. These changes have redefined not only the concept of work but also the models of work pedagogy in the Western world: capitalism and Marxism. Considering the current challenges, the pedagogy of work needs to be rethought, starting from the problem of employability and focusing on the new occupations in demand in the Internet age. By integrating ideas on interpreting work from the theories of Bauman, Rifkin, and Méda, it is possible to propose a pedagogy of work in the age of change and to outline possible values of education inspired by it.

In recent decades, more and more works have appeared, the authors of which are trying to predict possible scenarios for the future development of mankind. This article discusses 5 such scenarios: F. Fukuyama believes that all peoples and countries of the globe in the XXI century will develop in the direction of building a liberal-democratic society; Representatives of the Club of Rome in their latest report, based on statistical data of industrial development, substantiate the idea that by the middle of the XXI century. the Earth’s biosphere will become unsuitable for human life and humanity will begin to die out; representatives of the transhumanist movement in their “Manifesto” set themselves the goal of replacing the human biological body with an artificial body by 1245 and thereby saving people from diseases, from old age and even from death itself; English economist D. Susskind in his book “The Future Without Jobs” predicts that in the next two to three decades, robots and artificial intelligence will force people out of all areas of production and discusses the question of how people who are deprived of the opportunity to work will live; Finally, the Israeli historian Yu.N. Harari in his extensive work “Homo Deus” paints a picture of the fact that scientific and technological progress will turn “reasonable man” into “divine man” in the near future. Assessing all these scenarios for the future development of mankind, one involuntarily comes to the conclusion that they all speak of the death of mankind in the near future.

The article is an overview of the problems on the topic of figurativeness in scientific discourse. The analysis was carried out in three perspectives: “conceptual” - the key ideas about the role of figurativeness in the formation of scientific discourse (about metaphorical schemes that lie in the processes of thinking and scientific conceptualization, about the need to identify and analyze these schemes in science, about the role of comparison and analogy in the conceptual and semantic deployment of scientific discourse); “narrative” - the ideas about the function of figurativeness in the development of the author’s ontology are considered (the problems of constructing a rhetorical “Self” in scientific discourse, “self-identifying narrative”, “scientific identity”); “communicative” - the specificity of figurativeness is revealed in connection with the problem of knowledge transfer and modern strategies for popularizing science. It is shown that in the context of the modern identification of the “rhetoric” of scientific communication and discussion of strategies for science popularizing, the research topic is characterized by particular relevance. The analysis of figurativeness in scientific discourse touches upon the problem of the dialogue between science and society, which is important for our time, and how scientific achievements fit into socio-cultural and educational contexts. It is shown that the scientific significance of the study of figurativeness in scientific discourse is manifested in the fact that it allows, firstly, to expand the concept of “scientific”, revising the ideals of academic scientificity, often translating a view of science as an “emotionally emasculated” “substrate” of objective and transparent truth, and thereby overcome the existing communicative “barrier” between society and the scientific community; secondly, to rethink ideas about the communicative specifics of scientific creativity and the role of language in constructing the semantic and logical-methodological space of science.

Fundamentalism has been widely reckoned as one among many other watchful social phenomena currently. There are two general approaches to it. The first is from those who perceive fundamentalism as a movement of militant piety found almost in any religion, and therefore fundamentalism cannot necessarily be identified with a violent movement. The second is from those who categorize fundamentalism as a political movement with an objective of worldly power, and therefore it is susceptible to turning into a violent movement. In investigating the two views closely, I attempt to put forward a couple of hypothetical inquiries. Is fundamentalism a common phenomenon and common feature found in almost any religion? The answer is yes. Is fundamentalism identical to violent movement? The answer is no. Is fundamentalism then impossibly and utterly unrelated to violent movements? The answer is no. If fundamentalism is unidentical with violent movements but not a few fundamentalists can also turn to be perpetrators of what is called religious violence or violence in the name of religion, then what arguments can be set forth to ensure that fundamentalism cannot be overlooked anymore as one among many other major social problems of our age? This article aims to examine fundamentalism through epistemological and axiological criticism, and to investigate that to a certain range fundamentalism is a form of religious cognitive and behavioral bias, and both as a militant piety and as a political movement fundamentalism should at best be approached from their interplayed relation.

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