Vol 21, No 4 (2017)

The article introduces a philosophical examination of the dichotomy of Self and Other in the contemporary analysis of Christianity and Islam. Reviewing the phenomenon of the Other, the author refers to God as the object and the subject of the relationship “Human - Absolution” at the same time. The author reveals philosophical and religious ideas of the two world religions in the context of the historical development of their theological doctrines. The author discusses shared and specific religious ideas in the religious anthropology and epistemology of Islam and Christianity. Special attention is paid to religious ideas that contribute to the relationship of man and God in the individual’s strive towards achieving the unity with the Absolution. Moral categories of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, mutual understanding are pre-sented as the linking stages among the subject, Self, God, and the Other. The author emphasizes the philo-sophical-anthropological ideas, reflecting the fine line of the relations between the divine and human, when the Other becomes internally inherent, personal, spiritually enlightening the individual Self.

Despite the preservation of traditional political institutions, the mechanisms for including eros in the logic of power are undergoing serious changes in contemporary society in comparison with their classical forms. Specificity of these changes is caused by a number of reasons of historical, political and socio-cultural nature. First of all, THEY include various processes rooted in bourgeois revolutions, the secularization and democratization of society, the crisis of the basic metanarratives in the 20th century and, finally, the phenomenon of sexual revolution. One of the most heuristic theoretical attempts to comprehend the relationship between power and eroticism in nowadays society is, in the author's opinion, the model of discoursive and disciplinary control proposed by M. Foucault, and subsequently developed by a number of thinkers, including J. Butler. This research primarily relies on methodology of social criticism, philosophical comparativism and history of philosophy. Our analysis of the theories of diffusive and discoursive control, first of all, focuses on the following questions: how does the power participate in the formation of the subject of desire or, in other words, produce it, what is a disciplinary society, where the origin of disciplinary and normalizing control should be sought, what are the most ambiguous points of the studied approach to the subject, power and sexuality, and, finally, what alternative to the existing social order is offered by these theories.

The author of the article focuses on the concept of cultural synthesis, which is the key con-cept for the Russian Latin American studies. The author sets the questions of determining the semantic field of the very concept of “cultural synthesis”, of the possibility or impossibility of (culture) generating (a type of) interaction and its boundaries in the case of (historically) diverse cultural traditions encountered in the lands of the New World. The author reveals the different levels of the solution to the problem, offered by the Russian Latin American studies. The criticism of the “pre-theoretical” setting is offered, genetically related to the attempts of the continental cultural and philosophical reflection to comprehend the phenomenon of the miscegenative culture. The interpretative models are revealed, that arose in the Russian cultural and socio-cultural sys-tematical analysis, in which the rejection of one-dimensional socio-historical explanatory schemes occurs. The author offers the rethinking and reassessment of general theoretical and historical approaches, which will allow to identify and represent the process of the cultural genesis in Latin America in its original imbalance, non-linearity and abnormality. The author brings to light theoretical and methodological resources of the civilizational discourse, discussing the possibility of their application to the analysis of the given problem. Special attention is paid to the typological features of classical objects, formed “monoliths”, and becoming of non-classical borderline formations. In the framework of the borderline civilizations concept, the author introduces the vectors of the search for the problem solution, set by the ontological (static) and historical (dynamic) approaches.

The article is a first attempt to reconstruct an image of Indian philosophy created by Indian writer and sociologist Bankimchandra Chattopaddhyay. The goal of the research is to represent the process of turning Indian philosophy into the object of study based on objective idea. The research is based on phe-nomenological approach and hermeneutical method of analysis of the Bengal Renaissance texts. As a result, the image by Bankimchandra Chattopaddhyay is reconstructed as enlightening notion on history and content of Indian thought in the World philosophy context. It represents differences in goal-setting and content of In-dian philosophy - it sets a goal of knowledge acquiring for high spiritual ends and cultivates human’s passive relation to the world, society and his own life. Bankimchandra Chattopaddhyay established general approach to Indian philosophy as a specific tradition embodying universal search for the truth, but aimed at acquiring knowledge for the high goal of liberation from suffering rather than production of useful knowledge for society.

The article looks into the current and near-future challenges that necessitate a different lifestyle and way of thinking. The unity of science and art (Science-Art) is viewed in the context of these challenges as a way to respond to them. The article suggests building the unity of Science-Art upon the combination of the two science principles: economy of thought and redundancy of thought, which is typical for the artistic way of thinking. The article cites S. Pereslegin’s classification of thinking patterns and main features of scientific, artistic and engineering ways of thinking. The article shows impossibility of Science-Art within scientific monolectical thinking. It demonstrates that the condition for the unity of science and art is rising to dia- and trialectic levels of thinking; and the carriers of the Science-Art unity are currently engineers.

The paper shows the influence of physical concepts of space, time and motion on psycho-logical research of perception. The data of the experimental study of the formation of the concepts of time and speed, conducted by J. Piaget at the request of A. Einstein, are given. Ontological, physical-absolute and physical-relative paradigms of the notion of time are designated. The example of Zeno's aporias shows the methodological limitations of the epistemological paradigm in the psychology of perception. It is asserted that human thinking is not capable of direct interpretation of time, since the idea of duration is mediated in our thinking by representations of spatiality. As an alternative to the epistemological paradigm, the principles of the transcendental paradigm of the psychology of perception of A.I. Mirakyan are ex-pounded: form-generation and structural-procedural anisotropy. As an example of the implementation of these principles, a description of the generation of spatiality and duration at the sensory level of perception is given. The conclusion is made that in the methodological plan, psychology and physics are united by the common methodological search necessary for understanding space, time and motion. In the long term, there must be a paradigm shift: from the epistemological paradigm towards the ontological paradigm, and also from the priority of physical representations towards the psychological notions of space and time.

The author points out and explains the quiddity of the relationship between conservatism and aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. It is shown that the aesthetic distinction between fantasy and imagination, set forth by S.T. Coleridge, is a serious tool of conservative critique and self-critique. From the conservative point of view, imagination is a creative faculty, while fantasy is a passive one, i.e. dependent hugely on passions. It is for that reason that the latter is often understood as a preliminary source for utopian or, in other words, wishful thinking. The discussed distinction fits in the general pattern of conservative epistemology, the greatest exponent of which was D. Hume. The critical uses of the distinction today are partially exposed by Roger Scruton, a British conservative philosopher, in works such as “The Uses of Pes-simism: and the Danger of False Hope”, “Modern Culture and Thinkers of the New Left”. The author argues that the distinction is apt to play not only critical but also a constructive role in shaping the conservative discourse.

The article is devoted to the psychological aspects of perception of the mythological image of Kalki - the tenth avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu messiah, whose coming will destroy the moral and religious decline in the last days of Kali-yuga. The emotionality of the artistic text can be reduced to a constant antagonism between the emotional affects of form and emotional content of the text, during which there is a catharsis, provoking the reader's aesthetic response. The use of psychological analysis of emotional structures of religious text on the material about Kalki in the medieval Purāṇas gives the op-portunity to assess the quality and intensity of emotional experiences, associated with the perception of the image of the mythological hero. Our goal is to test the method of Vygotsky, described in the “Psychology of Art”, and to study the emotional content of the religious text on the material of the Purāṇic myth about Kalki.