10. Test your logic:

Holmes and Watson were invited to take part in a charity cricket match, playing for the Scotland Yard team. They both agreed to play.

Holmes made 56 runs. Watson scored twice as many as Inspector Lestrade and three times as many as sergeant Smith. Holmes’ score exceeded Watson’s by the same number of runs as Lestrade’s exceeded sergeant Smith’s..

CAN YOU GIVE EACH PLAYER’S SCORE?

11. Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words. Unit 10 berdyaev

Learn the topical vocabulary:

духовность	spirituality	возрождение	revival/renaissance
душевный	mental/emotional	ссылка	exile
переворот	revolution/coup	устойчивый	steady/stable
подъем	raise /enthusiasm	незыблемый	unshakable
иметь смысл	to make sense	несоответствующий	inappropriate/untrue
назначение	appointment/assignment	гордость	pride
общность	commonality	наказание	punishment

Pre-text activities:

1. What is religion? What forms of religion do you know?

2. There is an opinion that young people in our country are not really faithful. They

just like the ceremony of wedding, christening, communion… What do you think?

1. Read and translate the text:

Berdyaev N. A. (1874-1948), a Russian religious thinker, philosopher, is a leading representative of Christian Existentialism, a school of philosophy that stresses examination of the human condition within a Christian framework.

As the son of an aristocratic Ukrainian father and a French Roman Catholic mother, Nikolai Berdyaev imbibed the former’s rationalism and the latter’s spirituality. He reports having read Kant, Schpenhauer, and Hegel at the age of 14, and his later thought adhered to the tradition sufficiently for him to classify himself as “a Russian romantic of the early twenties century” . He became involved with Marxism in 1894, published his first article in a Marxist journal, and was imprisoned and exiled as a revolutionary. His university education at Kiev University was interrupted and never to be resumed again. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from becoming a deeply educated person – the range of his interests spread to many dimensions of human knowledge though the basis of his versatile life has always been the moral theme.

As we have already mentioned, Berdyaev’s spiritual evolution started with his youthful passion for Marxism, but soon his studies in philosophy brought him to changing his views and to quit non-Marxist conclusions. This happened after his release from exile when he traveled through Germany. Returning in 1904 to Russia he took part in a widespread religious and cultural revival becoming a follower of transcendental idealism.

Between 1904 and the revolution, he edited a journal in St Petersburg, traveled to France and Italy, and relocated to Moscow, where he was active in intellectual and religious circles. By 1917 he was a well known author of several books, which led the communists top grant him special rations, despite his open opposition to communism. He was elected Professor of Philosophy at the university of Moscow in 1920, but the religious character of his lectures and his persistent criticism of Marxism led to his being exiled, along with many other intellectuals, in 1922. After a brief stay in Germany, he settled in Paris, where he wrote more than twenty books.

In Paris Berdyaev’s talent blossomed out into its full, there he wrote his main books and articles, and became known as the foremost Russian emigre in France. His first essay “The New Medivial Period” translated into a number of languages brought Berdyaev the world fame. Then followed “Philosophy of Free Spirit”, “Freedom and Spirit”, “The Destiny of Man”, “Dream and Reality” and many other smaller but not less significant works.

In further developing his existentialist philosophy, Berdyev was inclined to prefer unsystematic and mystical modes of expression over logic and rationality. He asserted that truth was not the product of a rational quest but the result of “a light which breaks through from the transcendent world of the spirit”. He believed that man’s greatness was his share in this world of the spirit and in the divine capacity to create. A human act of creation enables man to arrive at truth by penetrating the confusion of the surrounding environment.

Berdyaev regarded himself as a religious metaphysician, and even as a Christian philosopher, although hardly an orthodox one, since he believed all orthodoxy incompatible with the freedom of thought essential to philosophical inquiry. Like Kant, whom he regarded as “a profoundly Christian thinker, more so than Thomas Aquinas”, he was especially concerned with reconciling human freedom with the determinism of objective nature. His major innovation in pursuing that goal is to suppose freedom to be primal reality, which, borrowing Jacob Bohemia’s term, he calls the Ungrund. The Ungrund is indeterminate potentiality combined with spontaneity toward definite form, somewhat comparable to Bergson’s whitehead’s creativity. As Aristotle does not say that prime matter exists, Berdyaev does not say that the Ungrund exists. What exist are “spirits”, individual process of creative activity. The cosmos consists solely of spirits – God is the “cosmic aim” – the initial, universal, nisus toward determinate values. The objective natural order is neither original nor fundamentally real. It is just the “outward” appearance of underlying, “inner”, creative activities. This “panpsychist” or “process” metaphysics resembles views espoused by Pierce and Whitehead, although it nowhere receives Whitehead’s sort of systematic elaboration.

Because humans are self-conscious spirits, this metaphysics implies an ethics. To the extent that human beings produce beauty and goodness, they cooperate with God in the ongoing creation of the cosmos and become genuine “persons”, not mere “egos”. Evil fundamentally consists in unrealized individual potentialities. Maximum human achievement requires cooperation and sobornost, a communal attitude which respects personal worth and freedom. The optimal social structure would be a “personalist socialism” which placed the development of human dignity and personality before economic goals and steered between the opposed evils of solitary individualism and tyrannical social conformity. States should serve persons rather than the converse. Since history does not display continuous progress toward this utopian goal, it is fundamentally tragic; but, like tragedy, it is significant and, as significant, of eternal worth.