No 1 (2011)

The article helms the reader to the analysis of the historical and philosophical background of the Master of Philosophy academic degree in Russian intellectual circles of the 19th and 20th centuries. Special emphasis is given to the university education while the related phenomena in «theological academies» are left unattended. The author draws on memoirs and official documents to highlight various landmarks pertaining to the process of Russian student development into the Master of Philosophy: preparation for the examination, examination, dispute, debate with opponents, dissertation, professional career.

The principal aim of this paper is to show that a constraint that C.D. Broad imposed on the acceptability of deductions of macroproperties which would show them to be non-emergent, viz. that they use only general laws of nature, is too strong and should be replaced by the weaker condition that the deductions be non-trivial. First, the relevant notion of generality is made more precise. I propose that a law is general iff it is applicable to a diversity of phenomena relative to what I call «domain constitutive properties». In order to substantiate the claim that Broad's constraint is too strong I analyse three examples of explanations of macroproperties from robotics and the life sciences. All of them are non-trivial explanations and should thereby render the explained properties non-emergent. Finally, I briefly indicate three ways in which an explanation may be non-trivial.