No 2 (2016)

The article exposes the author’s understanding of bureaucracy as a formal rationalization of human activity for the purpose of vertical-external management of it. In fact, it is an universal-international phenomenon, but in every country it has its own specifics. Traditionally, all the public cases in Russia were built on the powerfully vertical principle. The professional-communicative horizontal has always been underestimated or even forced out to the periphery. The chief figure (nachal’nik) is also very typical of the Russian bureaucratic “culture”. He is a man without a certain professional and business binding, a manager “of all trades”, instrumentally competent and politically loyal. To reach an admissible level of bureaucracy it is important to structure rationality by a search for optimality, to strengthen civil society and associated public control, to develop complexity thinking, to saturate relationships among people with social capital (primarily trust), etc.

The article provides the analysis of the prospect for sex-identity built outside the binary oppositions that establish the structural foundations both for our culture and our thinking. The problematic overcoming of the binarity without forming a new binary opposition is also examined. The author questions the limits and possibilities of true humanism within the binary typization and conceptualization of a subject.

Even though God’s name is very present in both the academic and political discourse, the reality is that God seems to have indeed «died», as Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus once said, because between the message and the finality of the authors’ endeavors there is a gap that places the world under the sign of chaos and pain. I am scanning the degree of honesty of some intellectuals who set the norms of the time, and some politicians who declare themselves Christians and insert in the ideology of their party Christian concepts and values. I have called them «opportunists of Heaven» because these intellectuals have transformed God into a subject of analysis as any other, and the politician utters His name to gain poll success. We see them climbing on the shoulders of God in order to define their careers: the intellectual wants to be accepted by the community of scholars which requires of him to be a free conscience, detached, impartial, independent; the politician wants to win votes from the electorate which asks of him to be moral. The secular state imposes its own moral, which doesn’t deny universal values but it actually changes their meaning. The criterion that no one can deviate from is the one of political correctness. In this paper, I shall focus on the way in which the Orthodox Church is involved in solving the crisis of the world, starting from key issues such as the human being, communion and sin. Man is invited to live inside the principle that creates the communion: the Logos. Therefore the solution would be adopting a Christ-centric perspective on life.

The article offers the analysis of I. Kant’s ideas in the light of the author’s conception of the «New Enlightenment». «To get enlightened», according to I. Kant, is not a right, but a duty of humanity. The «Old Enlightenment» has not come to an end as a historical era; it will be replaced with the «New Enlightenment» in the 21th century. The main features of the «New Enlightenment» are 1) the protection of reason from irrationalism; 2)

The article addresses Plato’s dialog Hippias minor as a text investigating the possibility of alternative models of morality presented by Homeric heroes Achilles and Odysseus. We study the way Socrates’ thought going from examples of particular acts to the level of moral abstractions. While on the level of concrete cases the acts of «heroic liars» seem to contradict certain principles of morality the further we go to its abstract core the greater is the gap between what is moral on its surface and what is moral indeed. Thus we see how Socrates comes from ethical question to metaphysical one which is found within the former.

The article focuses on the critical analysis of the concept of proper names as rigid designators. The arguments in favor of the theory of meaning for ordinary proper names and its problems are considered. The author comes to the conclusion that the theory is open to objection.