11. Write an essay on one of the following topics:

1. Oligarchic tendencies in advanced political systems.

2. The contemporary political systems based on constitutionalism and democracy.

3. Would you like to be the governor of the Kaliningrad Region?

12. Test your logic:

Holmes and Watson were on the trail of two bank robbers. “Do we know anything about them? Asked Watson as they boarded the Brighton train.

“Yes, Watson. My enquiries show that they were both born on the same day of the same year and of the same parents.’

“So they’re twins!” exclaimed Watson.

“Not so, Watson,” replied Holmes.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

13. Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words. Unit 9 soloviev

Learn the topical vocabulary:

своеобразие	peculiarity	единство цели	unity of purpose
рассматривать	consider/regard	системный	system defined
умозрительный	speculative	непревзойденный	unsurpassed
ценности	values	воплощение	embodiment
созерцательный	contemplative/meditative	широкомасштабный	wide-ranging
личность	personality/person/individual	аскетизм	asceticism
эгоизм	egoism/selfishness	бессознательный	unconscious
взаимодействие	interaction	предвидеть	anticipate
бросать вызов	to challenge	предпосылка	premise
опасность/риск	peril	тщетность	futility

Pre-text activities:

1. What is the unique feature of Russian philosophy?

2. Can we regard Russian philosophy as a system-defined unity?

3. What is the sense of Soloviev’s idea of God?

1. Read and translate the text:

Soloviev, Vladimir Sergeyevich (1853-1900), Russian religious philosopher, journalist and poet, was the son of the outstanding Russian historian Sergei Soloviev. His ancestors included clergymen, members of the gentry, officials, a sailor, and the Ukrainian philosopher Gregory Skovoroda. Vladimir was one of eleven children, four of whom died in infancy. The family lived in Moscow, and Vladimir’s father taught history at Moscow University. His parents created an intellectual and religious climate in the house, although they were not particularly pious.

In 1864 Vladimir entered one of Moscow’s best schools. Although some subjects were easy for him, he had serious difficulties with physics and mathematics. But it was apparently in those years that he started thinking about the fundamental problems of natural sciences, which would later lead him to create his own original philosophy. The calamities which regularly befell Russia prompted Vladimir to doubt church dogma according to which good, reason and beauty reigned in the world. He became an atheist and materialist, which was common among the younger generation at the time.

Very soon, Vladimir began to experience doubts concerning materialism. While he conceded that science was based on fact, he concluded that it failed to explain the meaning of life, death, beauty, good and evil. At the age of 19 he himself described the state he was in as death in life; he felt completely empty. Despite these spiritual crises, Vladimir managed to graduate from school with honours in 1869. Then he entered the History and Philolgy Department of Moscow University. Natural sciences, however, continued to attract his attention. It was his firm conviction that science could not be the ultimate aim of life – it was merely one of the means to attain the true moral purpose of life.

The ideas of Vladimir Soloviev were definitely ahead of their time. The philosopher clearly saw what awaited humanity in the ecological field. He wrote: “Our urban civilization takes everything from the land and gives nothing in return.”

Vladimir Soloviev himself was a poet, and some intellectuals even perceived him as a poet above all. But his poetry was clearly no more than illustration of his philosophical ideas, and the author himself did not take it seriously. Thus Vladimir Soloviev remains primarily a Russian philosopher. Many things , however, are still unclear about him. Nikolai Berdyaev wrote about him: “The image of Vladimir Soloviev remains mysterious. Rather than manifesting himself in his philosophy, theology, and journalism, he was concealing the contradictions of his spirit. It is equally possible to say about Soloviev that he was a mystic and a rationalist, Orthodox and Catholic, a church person and a free Gnostic, a conservative and a liberal. Opposite movements regarded him as their own. But he was in life and continued to be lonely and misunderstood”.

A pivotal problem of Soloviev’s philosophy is that of the human personality treated in the Christian tradition. He saw in the personality not only a relatively independent spiritual reality, but the primary element of the metaphysical collective personality – humankind. Soloviev regarded man as “the connecting link between the divine and the natural world”. For this reason, individual human existence assumes in his philosophy, a universal meaning. Divinity (the absolute) and the human personality are in Soloviev’s view the fundamental (though non-equivalent) elements of the evolution of the universe which aims at overcoming world evil, at enlightenment and spiritualization of the world. An imperfect man endowed with the potential for infinite perfection, endures the contradiction between the search for absolute freedom and the sensation of evil in a world dominated by mechanical causality. Consequently, “the central interest of human life lies in the distinction between good and evil, truth and falsehood”. In his earthly life, man has, according to Soloviev, the possibility for realizing two kinds of freedom: positive and negative. The former is achieved through the aspiration to know the absolute and ensures man’s ability to carry out the divine foreordination, the latter is achieved through unlimited self-affirmation of the individual “I” which results in the negation of freedom (unlimited self-affirmation causing non-freedom to others, ceases to be freedom for the individual himself). Substantiating in philosophical terms the inevitability of the spiritual self-destruction of the ”proud man”, Soloviev follows Dostoevsky in dealing with ethical problems. Equally destructive, in Soloviev’s opinion, is group self-affirmation. Yet, he does not consider self-denial for the purpose of a search for the absolute as rejection of freedom in general. Man realizes and experiences his freedom in the act of love (of people, of nature, of God) and in the moral act. The path to achieve positive freedom lies open to man through the experience of shame, compassion for others, as well as through critical self-observation. Following Kant, Soloviev maintained that in overcoming by a moral effort the inertia of mechanical causality, man brings himself closer to the absolute which personifies the fullness of truth, goodness and beauty. For Soloviev, knowledge, morality and creative freedom are, in the final analysis, indivisible as are indivisible misconception, evil and ugliness. In Soloviev’s doctrine, Plato’s teaching of eros combines, on the basis of Christian anthropology, with Kant’s categorical imperative. Soloviev solves the problem of good and evil on earth also in a religious spirit: the personality of Christ is testimony to, and guarantee of, the final triumph of good. Soloviev regarded the Christian Church as the receptacle of humanity’s accumulated moral experience registered in history. As regards the problem of the correlation of freedom and necessity in history and human life, he anticipated the ethical concepts of the 20^th-century Christian philosophy and religious existentialism. The place of Soloviev in the history of ethics is determined not only by the originality of his ideas and his specific conceptual influence but also by the fact that he created a moral philosophical system at the time when the European philosophical thought embarked on the path of ethical capitulation. Soloviev’s principal works treating of ethical problems: “Critique of Abstract Principles” (1880), “Spiritual Foundations of Life” (1884), “the Meaning of Love” (1892), “Vindication of Good” (1897-1899), “Three Conversations” (1900).