1. Philosophy of the Renaissance: anthropocentrism, humanism, pantheism.

2. Humanism as a revival of ancient culture in the individualistic spirit. Anticlericalism.

3. Political and utopian thought in the culture of the Renaissance.

4. The science of the Renaissance.

5. The Reformation: causes, content and nature.

The revival of classical civilization and learning in the 15th and 16th Century known as the Renaissance brought the Medieval period to a close. It was marked by a movement away from religion and medieval Scholasticism and towards Humanism and a new sense of critical enquiry.

But the credo of the two periods of the Renaissance is different. The arts and philosophy in the humanistic period of the Renaissance (from 1453 to 1600) were human-centered, emphasizing the place of humans in the universe. Philosophy during the natural science period (from 1600 to 1690) was cosmos-centered.

A new sense of critical enquiry arose that looked back to the ancient Greeks but also set the stage for the birth of modern philosophy in the Age of Reason.

The key thinkers of the early Renaissance are Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. By the end of the Renaissance, however, the significant figures were scientific thinkers, especially Nicolaus Copernicus, a mathematician and astronomer, and Galileo Galilei, a central figure in the scientific revolution. Among the major philosophical figures of the Renaissance were: Machiavelli; Thomas More; and Francis Bacon.

Moreover, Islamic scholars had already introduced most Attic and Hellenistic science into Western Europe, often with vast improvements on the original.

Humanism embodied the mystical and aesthetic temper of a pre-scientific age. It did not free the mind from subservience to ancient authority. The great libraries assembled by wealthy patrons of literature like Cosimo de Medici, Pope Nicholas V, and the Duke of Urbino, devoted much space to the Church Fathers and the Scholastic philosophers. The humanists did, however, read their authorities for aesthetic pleasure as well as moral uplift.

There is one writer whose work is of some importance in the history of ethics: Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). His book The Prince (1513) offered advice to rulers as to what they must do to achieve. Machiavelli is undoubtedly the most important political philosopher of the era and is best known for The Prince. During his political career (1494-1512) he served as secretary of the chancellery of the Council of Ten at Florence. The book attests to the corrupt practices among leaders in Renaissance Italy.

The Protestant Reformation was in part a response to the rampant corruption that had spread through the papacy. M. Luther was outraged by the selling of indulgences-in other words, paying a monetary fee for the sacrament of confession. The issue of selling indulgences was just a symptom of a greater cause.

John Calvin (1509-1564) developed a reform theology that attracted followers in France, Holland, Scotland, and England. Among the major Protestant movements, Calvinism steered furthest away from Catholicism in doctrine and practice. In undercutting the religious authority of the Catholic Church, downplaying subservience to tradition, and placing new importance on the individual, the Reformation caused a groundswell against all intellectual authorities and traditions.

The Renaissance philosophers’ awakened interest in nature led to a revival of natural philosophy, which was associated with G. Bruno, B.Telesio, T. Campanella, G. Cardano, Paracelsus, and F. Patrizi. 

The natural philosophy of the Renaissance was based on pantheism and hylozoism. 

However, on the whole, the Renaissance natural philosophers’understanding of nature was to a large extent fantastical and included astrological and alchemical concepts. 

Intense efforts to master theforces of nature led to an interest in magic, cabalism, and Pythagorean number-mysticism.

The Copernican Revolution. The Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) provided the first modern theory of planetary motion that was heliocentric-that placed the sun motionless at the center of the solar system with all the planets, including the earth, revolving around it.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) rejected the teleological view of nature espoused by Aristotle and embraced by Thomas Aquinas in his fifth argument for God's existence. Galileo didn't think it was the Bible's place to instruct about the astronomical data describing the workings of the universe.

The Renaissance is known best for its meaning-the “rebirth” of the classics. But it is also known for its transition to a less scholastic and more modern outlook on culture, religion, art, philosophy, and science. As much as Plato and Aristotle and other things classical were revived, a new methodological outlook on learning was born.

Required reading:

1. Allen, M. J. B., & Rees, V., eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

2. Bellitto, C., & al., eds., Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man (New York: Paulist Press, 2004).

3. Blum, P. R., ed., Philosophers of the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010).

4. Dougherty, M. V., ed., Pico della Mirandola: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

5. Ernst, G., Tommaso Campanella: The Book and the Body of Nature, transl. D. Marshall (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010).

6. Gatti, H., ed., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

7. Kraye, J., Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

8. Nauta, L., In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

9. Paganini, G., & Maia Neto, J. R., eds., Renaissance Scepticisms (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).

Optional reading:

1. Fantazzi, C., ed., A Companion to Juan Luis Vives (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

2. Mahoney, E. P., Two Aristotelians of the Italian Renaissance: Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

3. Hankins, J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

4. Halkin, Léon-E. (1993). Erasmus: A Critical Biography, translated by John Tonkin. Oxford: Blackwell.

5. Mansfield, Bruce (2003). Erasmus in the Twentieth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

6. Schoeck, Richard J.  (1993). Erasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists, 1501–1536, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

7. Tracy, James D. (1996) Erasmus of the Low Countries, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lecture 6. Philosophy of Modern period and the age of Enlightenment

1. The problem of the method: rationalistic doctrine and inductive method

2. Empiricism and sensualism as principles of human understanding

3. The doctrine of Hobbes on state.

An early proponent of the scientific method (Empiricism) was Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, statesman, essayist and scientist of the late Renaissance period. His major contribution to philosophy was his application of inductive reasoning, the approach used by modern science, rather than the a priori method of medieval Scholasticism and Aristotelianism. However, before beginning this induction, the philosopher must free his mind from certain false notions or tendencies which distort the truth, which he characterized as the four Idols: "Idols of the Tribe"; "Idols of the Cave"; "Idols of the Marketplace"; and "Idols of the Theatre".

In Ethits, he distinguished between duty to the community and duty to God.

Among his earlier publication were the "Essays", the "Colours of Good and Evil", the "Meditationes Sacrae" (which includes his famous aphorism, "knowledge is power", and the "Proficience and Advancement of Learning". In 1620, his "Novum Organum" ("The New Instrument"), the most important part of his fragmentary and incomplete "Instauratio Magna" ("The Great Renewal"), was published, and a second part, "De Augmentis Scientiarum" ("The Advancement of Learning"), was published in 1623.

"The New Atlantis", written in 1623 and published after his death in 1627, expressed Bacon's aspirations and ideals in the form of an idealized utopia and a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge.

Along with the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which the Age of Reason gave rise to, it is also known as the Early Modern period.

The Age of Reason of the 17th Century and the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th Century, along with the advances in science, the growth of religious tolerance and the rise of liberalism which went with them, mark the real beginnings of modern philosophy. In large part, the period can be seen as an ongoing battle between two opposing doctrines, Rationalism and Empiricism.

This revolution in philosophical thought was sparked by Rene Decartes, the first figure in the loose movement known as Rationalism. His method (known as methodological skepticism), was to shuck off everything about which there could be even a suspicion of doubt to arrive at the single indubitable principle that he possessed consciousness and was able to think ("I think, therefore I am").

Baruch Spinoza was a thoroughgoing Determinist who believed that absolutely everything (even human behaviour) occurs through the operation of necessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. He also took the Moral Relativist position.

The third great Rationalist was Gottfried Leibniz. According to Leibniz's theory, the real world is actually composed of eternal, non-material and mutually-independent elements he called monads, and the material world that we see and touch is actually just phenomena. The apparent harmony prevailing among monads arises because of the will of God.

He is also considered perhaps the most important logician between Aristotle and the mid-19th Century developments in modern formal Logic.

Another important 17th Century French Rationalist (although perhaps of the second order) was Nicolas Malebranche, who was a follower of Decartes in that he believed that humans attain knowledge through ideas or immaterial representations in the mind. However, Malebranche argued (more or less following St. Augustine) that all ideas actually exist only in God, and that God was the only active power. He believed in idea that he called Occasionalism.

In opposition to the continental European Rationalism movement was the equally loose movement of British Empiricism, which was also represented by three main proponents.

The first of the British Empiricists was John Locke. He argued that all of our ideas, whether simple or complex, are ultimately derived from experience.

Locke, like Avicenna before him, believed that the mind was a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and that people are born without innate ideas. Along with Hobbes and Rousseau, he was one of the originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical underpinning for democracy, republicanism, Liberalism and Libertarianism, and his political views influenced both the American and French Revolutions.

The next of the British Empiricists chronologically was Bishop George Berkeley, although his Empiricism was of a much more radical kind, mixed with a twist of Idealism. Using dense but cogent arguments, he developed the rather counter-intuitive system known as Immaterialism (or sometimes as Subjective Idealism). According to Berkeley's theory, an object only really exists if someone is there to see or sense it ("to be is to be perceived").

The third, and perhaps greatest, of the British Empiricists was David Hume. He believed that experience and observation must be the foundations of any logical argument. Hume argued that, although we may form beliefs and make inductive inferences about things outside our experience, they cannot be conclusively established by reason and we should not make any claims to certain knowledge about them.

Among the "non-aligned" philosophers of the period (many of whom were most active in the area of Political Philosophy) were the following:

Thomas Hobbes, who described in his famous book "Leviathan" how the natural state of mankind was brute-like and poor, and how the modern state was a kind of "social contract" (Contractarianism) whereby individuals deliberately give up their natural rights for the sake of protection by the state;

Blaise Pascal, a confirmed Fideist (the view that religious belief depends wholly on faith or revelation, rather than reason, intellect or natural theology) who opposed both Rationalism and Empiricism as being insufficient for determining major truths;

Adam Smith, widely cited as the father of modern economics, whose metaphor of the "invisible hand" of the free market (the apparent benefits to society of people behaving in their own interests) and whose book "The Wealth of Nations" had a huge influence on the development of modern Capitalism, Liberalism and Individualism; and

Edmund Burke, considered one of the founding fathers of modern Conservatism and Liberalism, although he also produced perhaps the first serious defense of Anarchism.

Required reading:

1. Bacon, F., 1620. The New Organon (Novum Organum), ed. by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

2. Spinoza, B., 1677 (2007), Theological-Political Treatise, Jonathan Israel (ed), Michael Silverstone and Jonathan Israel (trs). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Spinoza, B., 1677. Ethics, Volume 1 of The Collected Writings of Spinoza, tr. by E. Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

4. Descartes, R. 1644/1911. The Principles of Philosophy. Translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Descartes, R., 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. by John Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

6. Locke, J., 1690, An Essay on Human Understanding, ed. Woolhouse, Roger, London: Peguin Books, 1997.

7. Berkeley, George. Philosophical Works, Including the Works on Vision. Edited by Michael R. Ayers. Everyman edition. London: J. M. Dent, 1975.

8. Hume, D., 1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (1941), 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

9. Hume, D., 1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, second edition, ed. by R. Popkin, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.

10. Newton, I., 1687. Philosophiae naturalis Principia Mathematica, ed. by A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

11. Leibniz, G. W. 1686 /1991. Discourse on Metaphysics. Translated by D. Garter and R. Aries. Indianapolis: Hackett.

12. Leibniz, G. W. 1720/1925. The Monadology. Translated by R. Lotte. London: Oxford University Press.

Optional reading:

1. Russell, B: "A History of Western Philosophy". Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1972.

2. Boyle, D., 2009, Descartes on Innate Ideas, London: Continum.

3. Oliver, Simon, “Roger Bacon on Light, Truth and Experimentum,” Vivarium 42, no. 2 (2004), 151-180.

4. Power, Amanda, “A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon,” English Historical Review121, no. 492 (2006), 657-692.

5. Henry, J., 2002, Knowledge is Power. Francis Bacon and the Method of Science, Cambridge: Icon Books.

6. Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-modern Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001.

7. Stoneham, Tom. Berkeley's World: An Examination of the Three Dialogues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

8. Pappas, George S. Berkeley's Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

1. Deistic orientation of the French Enlightenment and the formulation of the problem of man.

2. The ideal of "naturalness" J.-J. Russo in the context of his critique of culture and civilization.

The Age of Enlightenment period of the Modern era of philosophy corresponds roughly to the 18th Century. In general terms, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement, developed mainly in France, Britain and Germany, which advocated freedom, democracy and reason as the primary values of society. It started from the standpoint that men's minds should be freed from ignorance, from superstition and from the arbitrary powers of the State, in order to allow mankind to achieve progress and perfection. The period was marked by a further decline in the influence of the church, governmental consolidation and greater rights for the common people. Politically, it was a time of revolutions and turmoil and of the overturning of established traditions.

It was essentially a continuation of the process of rationalization begun in the Age of Reason of the 17th Century, but also to some extent a reaction against it, and the two periods are often combined as the Early Modern period.

The Scientific Revolution of the 1500s and 1600s had transformed the way people in Europe looked at the world. In the 1700s, other scientists expanded European knowledge. For example, Edward Jenner developed a vaccine against smallpox, a disease whose path of death spanned the centuries. Scientific successes convinced educated Europeans of the power of human reason. Natural law, or rules discoverable by reason, govern scientific forces such as gravity and magnetism. In this way, the Scientific Revolution led to another revolution in thinking, known as the Enlightenment.

The Philosophes. In the 1700s, there was a flowering of Enlightenment thought. This was when a group of Enlightenment thinkers in France applied the methods of science to understand and improve society. They believed that the use of reason could lead to reforms of government, law, and society. These thinkers were called philosophes, which means “philosophers.” Their ideas soon spread beyond France and even beyond Europe.

An early and influential thinker was Baron de Montesquieu. Montesquieu advances the idea of separation of powers. He studied the governments of Europe, from Italy to England, he read about ancient and medieval Europe, and learned about Chinese and Native American cultures. His sharp criticism of absolute monarchy would open doors for later debate. In 1748, Montesquieu published The Spirit of the Laws, in which he discussed governments throughout history. Montesquieu felt that the best way to protect liberty was to divide the various functions and powers of government among three branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial.

Voltaire defends freedom of thought. Probably the most famous of the philosophes was François-Marie Arouet, who took the name Voltaire. “My trade,” said Voltaire, “is to say what I think,” and he did so throughout his long, controversial life. Voltaire used biting wit as a weapon to expose the abuses of his day. Voltaire’s outspoken attacks offended both the French government and the Catholic Church. He was imprisoned and forced into exile. Even as he saw his books outlawed and even burned, he continued to defend the principle of freedom of speech.

Diderot Edits the Encyclopedia. Denis Diderot worked for years to produce a 28-volume set of books called the Encyclopedia. As the editor, Diderot did more than just compile articles. His purpose was “to change the general way of thinking” by explaining ideas on topics such as government, philosophy, and religion. Diderot’s Encyclopedia included articles by leading thinkers of the day, including Montesquieu and Voltaire. In these articles, the philosophes denounced slavery, praised freedom of expression, and urged education for all. They attacked divine-right theory and traditional religions. Critics raised an outcry. The French government argued that the Encyclopedia was an attack on public morals, and the pope threatened to excommunicate Roman Catholics who bought or read the volumes. Despite these and other efforts to ban the Encyclopedia, more than 4,000 copies were printed between 1751 and 1789. When translated into other languages, the Encyclopedia helped spread Enlightenment ideas throughout Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.

Rousseau Promotes The Social Contract. J.-J. Rousseau believed that people in their natural state were basically good. This natural innocence, he felt, was corrupted by the evils of society, especially the unequal distribution of property. Many reformers and revolutionaries later adopted this view. Among them were Thomas Paine and Marquis de Lafayette, who were leading figures of the American and French Revolutions. In 1762, Rousseau set forth his ideas about government and society in The Social Contract. Rousseau felt that society placed too many limitations on people’s behavior. He believed that some controls were necessary, but that they should be minimal. Additionally, only governments that had been freely elected should impose these controls. Rousseau put his faith in the “general will,” or the best conscience of the people. Rousseau has influenced political and social thinkers for more than 200 years. Woven through his work is a hatred of all forms of political and economic oppression. His bold ideas would help fan the flames of revolt in years to come.

Women Challenge the Philosophes. The Enlightenment slogan “free and equal” did not apply to women. Though the philosophes said women had natural rights, their rights were limited to the areas of home and family. By the mid- to late-1700s, a small but growing number of women protested this view. Germaine de Staël in France and Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft in Britain argued that women were being excluded from the social contract itself. Their arguments, however, were ridiculed and often sharply condemned. Wollstonecraft was a well-known British social critic. She accepted that a woman’s first duty was to be a good mother but felt that a woman should be able to decide what was in her own interest without depending on her husband. In 1792, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In it, she called for equal education for girls and boys. Only education, she argued, could give women the tools they needed to participate equally with men in public life.

Required reading:

1. Diderot, Denis. Rameau's Nephew and other Works" (2008)

2. Diderot, Denis. "Letter on the Blind" in Tunstall, Kate E. Blindness and Enlightenment. An Essay. With a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind (Continuum, 2011)

3. Diderot, Denis. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles (1969)

4. Helvétius, C. A., 1758. De l'ésprit, or, Essays on the Mind and its several faculties, New York: B. Franklin, 1970.

5. Hobbes, T., 1651. Leviathan, ed. by R. Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

6. d'Holbach, Baron (Paul-Henri Thiry), 1770. System of Nature, three volumes, tr. by Richardson, New York: Garland Press, 1984.

7. Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 1748. The Spirit of the Laws, tr. by T. Nugent, New York: Dover, 1949.

8. Mandeville, B., 1714. Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits, ed. by P. Harth, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

9. Kant, I., 1784. “What is Enlightenment?” in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment, tr. by L. W. Beck, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959.

10. Rousseau, J.-J., 1762. On the Social Contract, tr. by M. Cranston, New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.

11. Voltaire (Francois-Marie d'Arouet), 1734. Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English Nation, Letters on England), ed. by L. Trancock, New York: Penguin, 2002.

12. Voltaire (Francois-Marie d'Arouet), 1752. Philosophical Dictionary, ed. by T. Besterman, London: Penguin, 2002.

13. Adorno, Theodor W, and Max Horkheimer, 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by Edmund Jephcott and edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Optional reading:

1. Gomez, Olga, et al. eds. The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (2001)

2. Dupré, Louis, 2004. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press.

3. Brewer, Daniel. The Enlightenment Past: reconstructing 18th-century French thought. (2008).

4. Broadie, Alexander. The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (2007)

5. Bronner, Stephen. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, 2004

6. Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind (2004)

7. Edelstein, Dan. The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press; 2010).

8. Golinski, Jan. "Science in the Enlightenment, Revisited," History of Science (2011)

9. Bertram, C., 2004, Rousseau and The Social Contract, London: Routledge.

10. Cohen, J. 2010, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11. Gauthier, D., 2006, Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lecture 7. German classical philosophy

1. Kant's transcendental dialectic as the doctrine of the mind and its purposes.

2. The dialectic of "I" and "non-self" in the doctrine of Fichte.

3. Hegel: the identity of being and thinking.

4. Feuerbach: the unity of being and thinking.

German Idealism is a philosophical movement centred in Germany during the Age of Enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th Century. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant and is closely linked with the Romanticism movement. It is sometimes referred to as Kantianism (although that more correctly also involves acceptance of Kant’s ethical and epistemological views).

Other than Kant himself, the main contributors (who all had their own versions of Kant's theory, some close in nature and some quite distinct) were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and (arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer, and additionally Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833), Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Although essentially a German movement, the Swiss-French writer and philosopher Madame de Stael (1766-1817) introduced (in her famous book "De l'Allemagne") the works of Kant and the German Idealists to French thinkers, who were still largely under the influence of John Locke at that time.

In general terms, Idealism is the theory that fundamental reality is made up of ideas or thoughts. It holds that the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or mental entities), and that we can never really be sure that matter or anything in the outside world actually exists. The concept of Idealism arguably dates back to Plato, and reached a peak with the pure Idealism of Bishop George Berkeley in the early 18th Century.

In the 1780s and 1790s, Immanuel Kant tried to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools of the 18th Century: Rationalism (which held that knowledge could be attained by reason alone, a priori), and Empiricism (which held that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses, a posteriori). Kant's Transcendental Idealism claims that we know more than Berkeley's ideas in our minds, in that we also directly know of at least the possibility of "noumena" ("things-in-themselves"), which are both empirically and transcendentally real even if they cannot be directly and immediately known. The actual "phenomena" which we perceive and which we think we know are really just the way things appear to us and not necessarily real.

Other German philosophers of the time used Kant's work as a starting point, adding in their own interpretations and biases. As a movement, it was not one of agreement (although there was some common ground), and each successive contributor rejected at least some of the theories of their predecessors. Many of the German Idealists who followed Kant, effectively tried to reverse Kant's refutation of all speculative theology and reinstate notions of faith and belief in their explanations of what exists beyond experience, a trend which was continued later in the 19th Century by the American Transcendentalists.

Jacobi, although in agreement with Kant that the objective thing-in-itself cannot be directly known, tried to legitimized belief and its theological associations by presenting the external world as an object of faith, even if logically unproven. Schulze tried to use Kant's own reasoning to disprove the existence of the "thing-in-itself", arguing that it cannot be the cause of an idea or image of a thing in the mind. Following from Schulze's criticism of the notion of a "thing-in-itself", Fichte asserted that there is no external thing-in-itself that produces the ideas, but our representations, ideas or mental images are merely the productions of ourego, or "knowing subject". Schelling's view was that the ideas or mental images in the mind are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind ("absolute identity"), so that there is no difference between the subjective and the objective. Schleiermacher's variation was that the ideal and the real do not have a productive or causal effect on each other, but are united and manifested in the transcendental entity which is God.

Another German Idealist, Hegel, claimed that pure abstract thought (as in Kant's formulations) is limited and leads to unsolvable contradictions. In order to overcome these shortcomings, Hegel introduced the integral importance of history and of the "Other" person in the awakening of self-consciousness. In the process, he established a whole new movement of Hegelianism, which in turn was hugely influential in the later development of continental Philosophy, Marxism and (by virtue of its opposition to Hegel) Analytic Philosophy.

Schopenhauer claimed that Kant's noumenon is the same as Will, or at least that Will is the most immediate manifestation of the noumenon that we can experience. He saw the "will-to-life" (a fundamental drive intertwined with desire) as the driving force of the world, prior to thought and even prior to being.

Kant's major contribution to Ethics was the theory of the Categorical Imperative, that we should act only in such a way that we would want our actions to become a universal law, applicable to everyone in a similar situation (Moral Universalism) and that we should treat other individuals as ends in themselves, not as mere means (Moral Absolutism), even if that means sacrificing the greater good. 

Kant believed that any attempts to prove God's existence are just a waste of time, because our concepts only work properly in the empirical world (which God is above and beyond), although he also argued that it was not irrational to believe in something that clearly cannot be proven either way (Fideism).

In the Modern period, Kantianism gave rise to the German Idealists, each of whom had their own interpretations of Kant's ideas.

J. Fichte, for example, rejected Kant's separation of "things in themselves" and things "as they appear to us" (which he saw as an invitation to Skepticism), although he did accept that consciousness of the self depends on the existence of something that is not part of the self (his famous "I / not-I" distinction). 

J.G. Fichte (1762-1814) was a German philosopher, and one of the founding figures of the German Idealism and Kantianism movements in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. At one time perceived merely as a bridge between the ideas of Kant and Hegel, he has since begun to be appreciated as an important philosopher in his own right, with original insights into the nature of self-awareness. Fichte's later Political Philosophy also contributed to the rise of German Nationalism. He is thought of by some as the father of German Nationalism.

After the publication of some radical works defending the principles of the French Revolution in 1793, Fichte began working in earnest on the formulation of his philosophy of Wissenschaftslehre which he continued to revise for most of the rest of his life. He saw it as a search for new foundations for Kant's Critical philosophy, although never as a repudiation of Kantianism. Following on from the "Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre" of 1794/5, came "Foundations of Natural Right Based on the Wissenschaftslehre", 1796/7 and "System of Ethical Theory Based on the Wissenschaftslehre", 1798. Other re-formulations, explanations and digests followed.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854) was a German philosopher, and one of the quintessential figures of the German Idealism and Romanticism movements in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. His views arguably always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between spirit and nature.

Always a champion of Romanticism, he advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, and which held the aesthetic and creative imagination as the highest values. Schelling's philosophy constituted a unique form of Idealism, known as Aesthetic Idealism.

Schelling's conception of "Naturphilosophie" has not fared well at the hands of modern science, which has roundly criticized his fragmentary knowledge of contemporary science, and his lack of intellectual rigour, but some of his thoughts are nevertheless original and valuable.

The most influential of the German Idealists, though, was Hegel (1770-1831), a philosopher of the early Modern period. He was a leading figure in the German Idealism movement in the early 19th Century, although his ideas went far beyond earlier Kantianism, and he founded his own school of Hegelianism. He has been called the "Aristotle of modern times", and he used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion. Despite charges of obscurantism and "pseudo-philosophy", Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought.

His influence has been immense, both within philosophy and in the other sciences, and he came to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools (whether they supported or opposed his ideas), not the least of which was the marxism of K. Marx which was to have so profound an effect on the political landscape of the 20th Century. Although his works have a reputation for abstractness and difficulty, Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought, and his influence was profound.

He extended Aristotle's process of dialectic (resolving a thesis and its opposing antithesis into a synthesis) to apply to the real world – including the whole of history – in an on-going process of conflict resolution towards what he called the Absolute Idea. However, he stressed that what is really changing in this process is the underlying "Geist" (mind, spirit, soul), and he saw each person's individual consciousness as being part of an Absolute Mind (sometimes referred to as Absolute Idealism).

His works have a reputation for their abstractness and difficulty. These difficulties are magnified for those reading him in translation, since his philosophical language and terminology in German often do not have direct analogues in other languages (e.g. his essential term "Geist" is usually translated as "mind" or "spirit", but these still do not cover the full depth of meaning of the word).

However, the traditional triadic dialectical interpretation of Hegel's approach (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) is perhaps too simplistic. From Hegel's point of view, analysis of any apparently simple identity or unity reveals underlying inner contradictions, and it is these contradictions that lead to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it presented itself, and its development into a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates the contradictions.

For a number of years in the mid-nineteenth century Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) played an important role in the history of post-Hegelian German philosophy, and in the transition from idealism to various forms of naturalism, materialism and positivism that is one of the most notable developments of this period.

That Feuerbach never accepted Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828. In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation.

Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of God and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as equally spiritless. Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the principle of its own development.

Feuerbach’s central claim in The Essence of Christianity is that religion is an alienated form of human self-consciousness insofar as it involves the relation of human beings to their own essence as though to a being distinct from themselves.

In the years following the appearance of The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach published two short philosophical manifestos, the “Preliminary Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy” (1842) and the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), in which he called for a radical break with the tradition of modern speculative thought. In Principles he locates the origin of this tradition in the Cartesian philosophy, and specifically in “the abstraction from the sensuous, from matter” through which the conception of the cogito first arose.

Required reading:

1. Russell, B: "A History of Western Philosophy", page xi. Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1972

2. Fichte, J.G. Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

3. Schelling, F.W.J. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: as Introduction to the Study of this Science, translated by E.E. Harris and P. Heath, introduction R. Stern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

4. Schelling, F.W.J. Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things, translated with an introduction by M. Vater, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

5. Schelling, F.W.J. On the History of Modern Philosophy, translation and introduction by A. Bowie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

6. Hegel, G. W. F., 1991, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett.

7. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller, 1977, tr. by Terry Pinkard, 2012.

8. Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic, tr. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols., 1929; tr. A. V. Miller, 1969; tr. George di Giovanni, 2010

9. Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, 1942; tr. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood, 1991

10. Feuerbach, L.A. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel with an intro by T. E. Wartenberg, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986.

11. Feuerbach, L.A. Thoughts on Death and Immortality from the Papers of a Thinker, trans. with intro and notes by J. A. Massey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Optional reading:

1. Ameriks, K., 2000, “The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, K. Ameriks (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 258–281.

2. Bishop, P., 2009, “Eudaimonism, Hedonism and Feuerbach’s Philosophy of the Future,”Intellectual History Review, 19(1): 65–81.

3. Breckman, W. 1999, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Gooch, T., 2011, “Some Political Implications of Feuerbach’s Theory of Religion,” in D. Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 257–280.

5. Gooch, T., 2013, “‘Bruno Reincarnate’: The Early Feuerbach on God, Love and Death,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte, 20(1): 1–23.

6. Harvey, V. A., 2009, “Ludwig Feuerbach,” in G. R. Oppy and N. Trakakis (eds.), The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, v. 4, New York: Oxford University Press, 133–144.

Marxism

1. Materialistic character of Marx’s dialectics.

2. Basic ideas of the social doctrine of Marxism.

Marxism, the philosophical and political school or tradition his work gave rise to, is a variety of radical or revolutionary Socialism conceived as a reaction against the rampant Capitalism and Liberalism of 19th Century Europe, with working class self-emancipation as its goal. Among other things, he is known for his analysis of history (particularly his concept of historical materialism) and the search for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change.

Marxism is an economic and social system derived from the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1829-1895). It is atheoretical-practical framework based on the analysis of "the conflicts between the powerful and the subjugated" with working class self-emancipation as its goal. It asserts that the Capitalist mode of production enables the bourgeoisie (or owners of capital) to exploit the proletariat (or workers) and that class struggle by the proletariat must be the central element in social and historical change. According to Marx, a socialist revolution must occur, in order to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the ulimate goal of public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

Classical Marxism is a variety of Socialism and provides the intellectual base for various forms of Communism. It was conceived (as to some extent was Anarchism) as a reaction against the rampant Capitalism and Liberalism of 19th Century Europe. It is grounded in Materialism and it is committed to political practice as the end goal of all thought. As a philosopher, Marx was influenced by a number of different thinkers, including: German philosophers (e.g. Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach); British political economists (e.g. Adam Smith and David Ricardo); and French social theorists (e.g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Flora Tristan and Louis Blanc).

The defining document of Marxism and Communism is "The Communist Manifesto", published jointly by Marx and Engels in 1848. The first volume of "Das Kapital" (Marx's ambitious treatise on political economy and critical analysis of Capitalism and its practical economic application) was published in 1867, with two more volumes edited and published after his death by Engels. For the most part, these works were collaborations and, while Marx is the more famous of the two, he was strongly influencedby Engels' earlier works, and Engels was also responsible for much of the interpretation and editing of Marx's work.

Some of the basic ideas behind Marxism include:

• Exploitation and Alienation: Capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers by the owners of capital, due to the fact that the workers' labour power generates a surplus value greater than the workers' wages. This expropriation of surpluses leads to increasing alienation and resentment of workers, because they have no control over the labour or product which they produce (a systematic result of the Capitalist system, it is argued).

• Labour Theory of Value: The value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average amount of labour hours that are required to produce that commodity. This is similar to the value theory established by classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772-1823), although for Marx it is socially necessary labour which is important (i.e. the amount needed to produce, and reproduce, a commodity under average working conditions).

• Base and Superstructure: Relations are established among people as they produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and these relations form the economic basis of society. A "superstructure" of political and legal institutions, and a social consciousness of religious, philosophical, ideological and other ideas arises on this "base". Any social revolution (caused by conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production) will result in a change in the economic basis and thence to the transformation of the superstructure.

• Class Consciousness: Any social class possesses an awareness (of itself, of the conditions of life, and of the social world around it), and its capacity to act in its own rational interests is based on this awareness. Thus, class consciousness must be attained before any class may mount a successful revolution.

• Ideology: The ruling class foists the dominant ideology on all members of that society in order to make its own interests appear to be the interests of all. Therefore, the ideology of a society can be used to confuse alienated groups and create a false consciousness (such as commodity fetishism, where social relationships are transformed into apparently objective relationships between commodities or money).

• Historical and Dialectical Materialism: This refers to the adaptation by Marx and Engels of Georg Hegel's theory of Dialectics, the concept that any idea or event (the thesis) generates its opposite (the antithesis), eventually leading to areconciliation of opposites (a new, more advanced synthesis). Marx realized that this could also be applied to material matters like economics, hence the label Dialectical Materialism. The application of the principle of Dialectical Materialism to history and sociology, the main context in which Marx used it, is known as Historical Materialism. The resulting theory posits that history is the product of class struggle and obeys the general Hegelian principle of the development of thesis and antithesis.

Primary sources:

1. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin, 1975.

2. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works, New York and London: International Publishers. 1975.

3. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Works, 2 Volumes, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962.

4. Marx, Karl, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2^nd edition, David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

5. Engels, Frederick, (1877) Anti-Dühring, Part I: Philosophy, XIII. Dialectics. Negation of the Negation

6. Engels, Frederick, (1883) Dialectics of Nature. Marxists.org. Retrieved 2011-11-03.

7. Lenin, V.I., On the Question of Dialectics: A Collection, pp. 7-9. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980.

8. Lenin, V.I., Philosophycal Notebooks. Collected Works, Vol. 38. Digital edition. www.marx2mao.com

Secondary sources:

1. Breckman, W. 1999, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Brudney, Daniel, 1998, Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3. Cohen, G.A., 2001, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

4. Desai, Megnad, 2002, Marx's Revenge, London: Verso.

5. Leopold, David, 2007, The Young Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. Singer, Peter, 2000, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7. Wolff, Jonathan, 2002, Why Read Marx Today?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lecture 8. The non-classical Western philosophy

1. "The turn in philosophy" at the end of the XIX century.

2. The doctrine of the “world will” of A.Shopenhauer.

3. S. Kierkegaard: life as existential.

4. Revaluation of values in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

The Modern period of philosophy generally corresponds to the 19th and 20th Century. More recent developments in the late 20th Century are sometimes referred to as the Contemporary period. Along with significant scientific and political revolutions, the Modern period exploded in a flurry of new philosophical movements. In addition to further developements in Age of Enlightenment movements such as German Idealism, Kantianism, and Romanticism, the Modern period saw the rise of Continental Philosophy, Hegelianism, Transcendentalism, Existentialism, Marxism, Modernism, Positivism, Utilitarianism, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Logical Positivism, Ordinary Language Philosophy, Logicism, Phenomenology, and the more contemporary Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism and Deconstrutionism, among others.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher, and an important figure in the German Idealism and Romanticism movements in the early 19th Century. He believed that the "will-to-life" (the force driving man to survive and to reproduce) was the driving force of the world, and that the pursuit of happiness, love and intellectual satisfaction was essentially futile and anyway secondary to the innate imperative of procreation. His vision of Aesthetics and his doctrine of Voluntarism (as well as his aphoristic writing style) influenced many later philosophers as well as the Romantics of his own time. Perhaps more than any other major philosopher, Schopenhauer has been subject to trends and fashions in popularity, sinking from celebrity and renown to almost complete obscurity, before rebounding again in recent years (not least because of his perceived influence on the young Wittgenstein and Nietzsche).

Schopenhauer was very much an atypical philosopher. He was genuinely interested and knowledgeable about Hinduism and Buddhism, and the only major Western philosopher to draw serious parallels between Western and Eastern Philosophy. He was the first major philosopher to be openly atheist, and was unusual in placing the arts and Aesthetics so highly.

His most important work is usually considered to be "The World as Will and Representation" of 1819, in which he expounded his doctrine of Pessimism (the evaluation and perception of life in a generally negative light). In contrast to wide-ranging optimism of most his Romantic contemporaries in 19th Century Germany, he felt that all existence was ultimately futile since it can be fundamentally characterized by a want of satisfaction that can never be attained.

Suren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a 19th Century Danish philosopher and theologian. Although relatively isolated during his life, he became extremely influential once his works were translated into German after his death. Sometimes dubbed "the father of Existentialism", his works represent a reaction against the dominant Hegelian philosophy of the day (and against the state church in Denmark), and set the stage for modern Existentialism.

He was a lifelong committed Lutheran and a prominent supporter of the doctrine of Fideism, the view that religious belief depends on faith or revelation, rather than reason, intellect or natural theology.

Kierkegaard's peculiar authorship and literary style employed irony, satire, parody, humour, polemic and a dialectical method of "indirect communication" in order to deepen the reader’s passionate subjective engagement with ultimate existential issues.

He elaborated on a host of philosophical, psychological, literary and theological categories (including anxiety, despair, etc.n). Throughout his work, he took Socrates and Jesus Christ as his role models, and saw how one lives one’s life as the prime criterion of being in the truth.

Kierkegaard's early works, his university thesis "On the Concept of Irony" of 1841 and "Either/Or" of 1843, both critiqued major figures in Western philosophic thought (Socrates in the former, and Hegel in the latter), and showcased Kierkegaard's unique style of writing.

Later in 1843, he published "Fear and Trembling", which, together with "Either/Or", is perhaps his best known book. Focusing on the Biblical story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, this work (as well as "Repetition" of the same year), moves beyond the aesthetic and the ethical, and introduces a higher stage on the dialectical ladder, the religious. His works from 1844 to 1846 (written using a pseudonym), focus even more on the perceived shortcomings of the philosophy of Hegel and form the basis for existential psychology.

His second period of authorship is focused more on the perceived hypocrisy and shallowness of Christendom and modern society in general. He attempted to present Christianity as he thought it should be, and encouraged embracing Christ as the absolute paradox. From around 1848 until his death, Kierkegaard carried on a sustained literary attack on the Danish State Church.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a 19th century German philosopher and philologist. He is considered an important forerunner of Existentialism movement, and his work has generated an extensive secondary literature within both the Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy traditions of the 20th Century.

He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, famously asserting that "God is dead", leading to (generally justified) charges of Atheism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism and Nigilism. His original notions of the "will to power" as mankind's main motivating principle, of the "Ubermensch" as the goal of humanity, and of "eternal return" as a means of evaluating ones life, have all generated much debate and argument among scholars.

His most important books include "Human, All Too Human" of 1878, "The Gay Science" of 1882, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" of 1883-1885, "Beyond Good and Evil" of 1886, "On the Genealogy of Morality" of 1887, and "Twilight of the Idols" and "The Antichrist", both of 1888. It is in these books that Nietzsche develops some of his major themes (which are discussed in more detail below), including his "immoralism", his view that "God is dead", his notions of the "will to power" and of the "Ubermensch", and his suggestion of "eternal return".

In Ethics, Nietzsche called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral schemes of his day, including Christianity, Kantianism and Utilitarianism. However, rather than destroying morality, Nietzsche wanted a re-evaluation of the values of Judeo-Christianity, preferring the more naturalistic source of value which he found in the vital impulses of life itself.

He posited that the original system of morality was the "master-morality", dating back to ancient Greece, where value arises as a contrast between good and bad. "Slave-morality", in contrast, came about as a reaction to master-morality, and is associated with the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is that of the "Ubermensch", introduced in his 1883 book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Variously translated as "superman", "superhuman" or "overman" (although the word is actually gender-neutral in German), this refers to the person who lives above and beyond pleasure and suffering, treating both circumstances equally, because joy and suffering are, in his view, inseparable.

Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th century, especially in Continental Europe. In English-speaking countries, his positive reception has been less resonant.

Required reading:

1. Schopenhauer, A. 2010: The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, translated by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Jordan, N., 2010, Schopenhauer's Ethics of Patience: Virtue, Salvation and Value, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press.

3. Carlisle, Clare, 2005, Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions, Albany: State University of New York Press.

4. Theunissen, Michael, 2005, Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair, translated by Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck, Princeton University Press.

5. Grøn, Arne, 2008, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Jeanette B.L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press.

6. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

7. Untimely Meditations. trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

8. The Will to Power. trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967.

Optional reading

1. Pyper, Hugh, 2011, The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader, Sheffield & Oakville: Equinox.

2. Podmore, Simon D., 2011, Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indian University Press.

3. Emden, Christian J., 2008, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Janaway, Christopher, 2007, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. Lemm, Vanessa, 2009, Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being. New York: Fordham University Press.

6. Mabille, Louise, 2009, Nietzsche and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

7. Rampley, Matthew, 2007, Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8. Shaw, Tamsin, 2007, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lecture 9. Schools and trends in philosophy of the XXth century. Postmodernism

1. General philosophical traditions of XXth century

2. Scientism and anti-scientism in philosophy of the XX century.

3. Modernism and Postmodernism.

20th Century philosophy has been dominated to a great extent by the rivalry between two very general philosophical traditions, Analytic philosophy (the largely, anglophone mindset that philosophy should apply logical techniques and be consistent with modern science) and Continental Philosophy (really just a catch-all label for everything else, mainly based in mainland Europe, and which, in very general terms, rejects Scientism and tends towards Historicism).

Analytic Philosophy (or sometimes Analytical Philosophy) is a 20th Century movement in philosophy which holds that philosophy should apply logical techniques in order to attain conceptual clarity, and that philosophy should be consistent with the success of modern science. For many Analytic Philosophers, language is the principal (perhaps the only) tool and philosophy consists in clarifying how language can be used.

Analytic Philosophy is also used as a catch-all phrase to include all (mainly Anglophone) branches of contemporary philosophynot included under the label Continental Philosophy, such as Logical Positivism, Logicism and Ordinary Language Philosophy. To some extent, these various schools all derive from pioneering work at Cambridge University in the early 20th Century and then at Oxford University after World War II, although many contributors were in fact originally from Continental Europe.

Analytic Philosophy as a specific movement was led by B. Russell, A.N. Whitehead, G.E. Moore and L. Wittgenstein. Turning away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism (particularly objecting to its Idealism and its almost deliberate obscurity), they began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis based on new developments in Logic, and succeeded in making substantial contributions to philosophical Logic over the first half of the 20th Century.

Continental Philosophy refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th Century philosophy in mainland Europe. It is a general term for those philosophical schools and movements not included under the label Analytic Philosophy, which was the other, largely Anglophone, main philosophical tradition of the period. As a movement, Continental Philosophy lacks clear definition, and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views, its main purpose being to distinguish itself from Analytic Philosophy, although the term was used as early as 1840 by John Stuart Mill to distinguish European Kant-influenced thought from the more British-based movements such as British Empiricism and Utilitarianism.

Continental Philosophy, then, is a catch-all label incorporating such Continental European-based schools as German Idealism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Romanticism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Marxism, Deconstructionism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Hermeneutics, French Feminism, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

Pragmatism (or Pragmaticism) is the view that considers practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth. More simply, something is true only insofar as it works. It argues that the meaning of any concept can be equated with the conceivable operational or practical consequences of whatever the concept portrays. Like the related notion of Instrumentalism, Pragmatism asserts that any theory that proves itself more successful in predicting and controlling our world than its rivals can be considered to be nearer the truth.

Thus, slow and stumbling ratiocination is not necessarily to be automatically preferred over instinct, introspection and tradition, which are all valid methods for philosophical investigation, even if they each have their own drawbacks.

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition or movement of the first half of the 20th Century, developed largely by the German philosophers E. Husserl and M. Heidegger, which is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness, and not of anything independent of human consciousness.

Phenomenology, as it is understood today, is essentially the vision of one man, E. Husserl, which he launched in his"Logical Investigations" of 1901, although credit should also be given to the pioneering work on intentionality (the notion that consciousness is always intentional or directed) by Husserl's teacher, the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and his colleague, Carl Stumpf (1848-1936).

M. Heidegger criticized and expanded Husserl 's phenomenological enquiry (particularly in his "Being and Time" of 1927) to encompass our understanding and experience of Being itself, and developed his original theory of "Dasein" (the non-dualistic human being, engaged in the world). 

Husserl charged Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, but Heidegger's development of Existential Phenomenology greatly influenced the subsequent flowering of Existentialism in France.

Positivism is a philosophical school developed by the French sociologist and philospher Auguste Comte in the mid-19th Century. Comte believed that Metaphysics and theology should be replaced by a hierarchy of sciences, from mathematics at the base to sociology at the top. The school is based around the idea that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method.

As a religious system, developed by Comte later in his life, Positivism denies the existence of a personal God and takes humanity ("the great being") as the object of its veneration and cult, and in this respect has similarities to Humanism. Comte developed a hierarchical priesthood, positive dogmas, an organized cult, and even a calendar on the model of Catholicism.

Although not a large movement in terms of individual contributors, its influence on subsequent philosophic thought was quite profound.

The principles of Positivism as a philosophical system were accepted and applied in England by J.S. Mill, a major figure in the Utilitarianism movement. Later, in the early 20th Century, it gave rise to the stricter and more radical movement of Logical Positivism.

Ordinary Language Philosophy (aka Linguistic Philosophy or Natural Language Philosophy) is a 20th Century philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by forgetting what words actually mean in a language, and taking them in abstraction and out of context.

Ordinary Language Analysis typically involves eschewing philosophical "theories" in favour of close attention to the details of the use of non-technical everyday "ordinary" language. Thus, it argues, the contemplation of language in its normal use, can"dissolve" the appearance of philosophical problems, rather than attempting to solve them.

Analytic philosophers such as the young L. Wittgenstein, B. Russell, W.V.O. Quine and R. Carnap (1891-1970), all attempted to improve upon natural language using the resources of modern Logic, in an attempt to make it more unambiguous and to accurately represent the world, in order to better deal with the questions of philosophy ("ideal language" analysis).

However, Wittgenstein's later unpublished work in the 1930's began to centre around the idea that maybe there is nothing wrong with ordinary language as it stands, and that perhaps many traditional philosophical problems were only illusions brought on bymisunderstandings about language and related subjects. Although heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and his students at Cambridge, Ordinary Language Philosophy largely flourished and developed at Oxford in the 1940s, under Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin (1911-1960), Peter Strawson (1919-2006), John Wisdom (1904-1993) and others, and was quite widespread for a time before declining rapidly in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Existentialism is a movement in philosophy and literature that emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. It began in the mid-to-late 19th Century, but reached its peak in mid-20th Century France. It focuses on the question of human existence, and the feeling that there is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence. It holds that, as there is no God or any other transcendent force, the only way to counter this nothingness is by embracing existence.

Thus, Existentialism believes that individuals are entirely free and must take personal responsibility for themselves, and emphasizes action, freedom and decision as fundamental in rising above the essentially absurd condition of humanity.

Both philosophers considered the role of making free choices on fundamental values and beliefs to be essential in the attempt to change the nature and identity of the chooser. In Kierkegaard's case, this results in the "knight of faith", who puts complete faith in himself and in God, as described in his 1843 work "Fear and Trembling". In Nietzsche's case, the much maligned "Ubermensch" (or "Superman") attains superiority and transcendence without resorting to the "other-worldliness" of Christianity, in his books "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1885) and "Beyond Good and Evil" (1887).

The Phenomenologist Heidegger was an important philosopher in the movement, especially his influential 1927 work "Being and Time", although he vehemently denied being an Existentialist in the Sartrean sense.

Other major influences include Max Stirner (1806-1856), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Husserl, and writers like the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and the Czech Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

Existentialism came of age in the mid-20th Century, largely through the scholarly and fictional works of the French existentialists, J.-P. Sartre, Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), all of whose works popularized existential themes, such as dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment and nothingness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is another influential and often overlooked French Existentialist of the period.

Sartre is perhaps the most well-known, as well as one of the few to have actually accepted being called an "existentialist"."Being and Nothingness" (1943) is his most important work, and his novels and plays, including "Nausea" (1938) and "No Exit" (1944), helped to popularize the movement.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus (who is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom again each time) to exemplify the pointlessness of existence, but shows that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it.

Modernism refers to a reforming movement in art, architecture, music, literature and the applied arts during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. There is no specifically Modernist movement in Philosophy, but rather Modernism refers to a movement within the arts which had some influence over later philosophical thought. The later reaction against Modernism gave rise to the Post-Modernist  movement both in the arts and in philosophy.

By the time Modernism had become so institutionalized and mainstream that it was considered "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement, it generated in turn its own reaction, known as Post-Modernism, which was both a response to Modernism and a rediscovery of the value of older forms of art. Modernism remains much more a movement in the arts than in philosophy, although Post-Modernism has a specifically philosophical aspect in addition to the artistic one.

Post-Modernism is a broad movement in late 20th Century philosophy and the arts, marked in general terms by an opennessto meaning and authority from unexpected places, and a willingness to borrow unashamedly from previous movements or traditions. It is often defined negatively as a reaction or opposition to the equally ill-defined Modernism, although some claim that it represents a whole new paradigm in intellectual thought.

In Philosophy specifically, Post-Modernism was heavily influenced by Continental Philosophy movements like Phenomenology, Structuralism and Existentialism, and it is generally skeptical of many of the values and bases of Analytic Philosophy. It is generally viewed as openness to meaning and authority from unexpected places, so that the ultimate source of authority is the actual "play" of the discourse itself. It can be considered a "pick-and-mix" approach, whereby basic problems are approachable from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.

Among the best-known Post-Modernist philosophers are Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Fransois Lyotard (1924-1998), Richard Rorty (1931-2007), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980).

Lyotard is perhaps one of the most identifiable Post-Modernists, and he has described Post-Modernism as a condition of the present state of culture, social structure and self. He is largely concerned with the role of narrative in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as we have left modernity and entered a post-industrial or post-modern condition.

Baudrillard has argued that we live in a "hyperreal", post-modern, post-industrial, post-everything sort of a world, and global reality has become dominated by an internationalized popular culture to such an extent that people have great difficulty deciding what is real.

Structuralism is a 20th Century intellectual movement and approach to the human sciences (it has had a profound effect on linguistics, sociology, anthropology and other fields in addition to philosophy) that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts.

Broadly speaking, Structuralism holds that all human activity and its products, even perception and thought itself, are constructed and not natural, and in particular that everything has meaning because of the language system in which we operate. It is closely related to Semiotics, the study of signs, symbols and communication, andhow meaning is constructed and understood.

Although they would probably all have denied being part of this so-called movement, the philosopher Michel Foucault, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), the linguists Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Noam Chomsky (1928), the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and the Marxist theorists Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) were all instrumental in developing the theory and techniques of Structuralism, most of this development occurring in France.

Barthes, in particular, demonstrated the way in which the mass media disseminated ideological views based on its ability to make signs, images and signifiers work in a particular way, conveying deeper, mythical meanings within popular culture than the surface images immediately suggest (e.g. the Union jack signifies the nation, the crown, the empire, "Britishness", etc).

By the 1960s, it had become a major force within the overall Continental Philosophy movement in Europe, and came to take Existentialism’s pedestal in 1960s France.

In the 1970s, however, it came under increasing internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and a historical, and for favouring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual people to act.

Schools like Deconstructionism and Post-Structuralism attempted to distinguish themselves from the simple use of the structural method and to break with structuralistic thought. In retrospect, it is more these movements it spawned, rather than Structuralism itself, which commands attention.

Post-Structuralism is a late 20th Century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, which is difficult to summarize but which generally defines itself in its opposition to the popular Structuralism movement which preceded it in 1950s and 1960s France. It is closely related to Post-Modernism, although the two concepts are not synonymous.

Post-Structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s, a period of political turmoil, rebellion and disillusionment with traditional values, accompanied by a resurgence of interest in Feminism, Western Marxism, Phenomenology and Nihilism.

Many prominent Post-Structuralists (generally labelled as such by others rather than by themselves), such as Derrida, Foucault and Roland Barthes, were initially Structuralists but later came to explicitly reject most of Structuralism's claims, particularly its notion of the fixity of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, but also the overall grandness of the theory, which seemed to promise everything and yet not quite to deliver.

In his 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science", Derrida, was one of the first to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and identified an apparent de-stabilizing or de-centring in intellectual life (referring to the displacement of the author of a text as having greatest effect on a text itself, in favour of the various readers of the text), which came to be known as Post-Structuralism.

Roland Barthes, originally a confirmed Structuralist, published his “The Death of the Author” in 1968, in which he argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. In his 1967 work "Elements of Semiology", he also advanced the concept of the metalanguage, a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of traditional (first-order) language.

Other notable Post-Structuralists include Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), Julia Kristeva (1941), Umberto Eco (1932), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) and Judith Butler (1956).

Deconstructionism (or sometimes just Deconstruction) is a 20th Century school in philosophy initiated by Derrida in the 1960s. It is a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. Although Derrida himself denied that it was a method or school or doctrine of philosophy (or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself), the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism.

Major influences on Derrida's thinking were the Phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, although mainly in a negative sense (Derrida's early work was mainly an elaborate critique of the limitations of Phenomenology). The development of Deconstructionism mainly took place at Yale University between the 1960s and 1980s, in a climate heavily influenced by the contemporaneous development of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. In addition to Derrida, other Yale philosophers who had a hand in the development of Deconstructionism include Paul de Man (1919-1983), Geoffrey Hartman(1929), and J. Hillis Miller (1928).

Required reading:

1. Russell, B: "A History of Western Philosophy", Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1972.

2. Delacampagne, C., De Bevoise, Valcolm B. (Translator). A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Johns Hopkins University Press, September 27, 2001.

3. Wittgenstein, L.  1921/1966.  Tractatus-logico-philosophicus.  Trans, D F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness.  New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

4. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945/1962. Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de lye Perception).Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

5. Husserl, E. 1929/1960. Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: M. Nijhoff.

6. Rorty, R. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge, UK, 2007.

7. Derrida, J. Speech and Phenomena, tr. David B. Allison (Northwestern University Press: 1973).

8. Maritain, J. Introduction to Philosophy. Westminster MD: Christian Classics, 1991.

9. Camus, A. Between Hell and Reason, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991 [Available online].

10. Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Optional reading:

1. Pettegrew, J., ed., A Pragmatist's Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.

2. Bernstein, J. M. (ed.), 2010, Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Brandom, R, ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

4. Brittain, C. C., 2010, Adorno and Theology, London: T. & T. Clark.

5. Burke, D. A., et al. (eds.), 2007, Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

6. Claussen, D., 2008, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

7. Cook, D., 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, New York: Routledge.

8. Sagi, A., 2002, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.

Lecture 10. The problems of Russian and Kazakh philosophy

1. Basic values of the Kazakh philosophy.

2. Profound communication as the basis of the Kazakhs’ traditional worldview.

3. The Kazakh Enlightenment philosophy.

In the context of the modern problems of the humanitarian sphere many cultures started to show more active interest to their ethnic past, to those historic sources, which belong to the traditional forms of morality. In the large the adreesing to the ethnic experience, to the traditional spiritual values of nation has always been one of the necessary conditions of the intellectual, constructive successes of the growing new generation. Like all the cultural – historical paradigms the Kazakh philosophic thought has passed the complicated way of establishment from the ancient primordial forms of thinking to the quite mature modern philosophic conceptions. Centuries – old history and actualization of the basic moral values in the historic process were the bases for establishment of such fundamental ethical notions in the ethnic worldview as good and evil, love and hatred, nobleness and meanness etc.

Moral – ethical orientation of the worldview universal phenomenon of the ancient turks and the Kazakh society of the midlle ages is unquestionable. The medieval turkic thinker Al-Farabi in his philosophic system profoundly worked out such ethical categories as happiness, humanism, moral purification, spiritual perfection etc. These notions obtain their diverse philosophic interpretation on the next stages of the pholosophic thought development on the Kazakh land in the Yussuf Balasaguni’s, Mahmoud Kashgari’s, Ahmed Yugneki’s, Hoja Ahmed Yassui’s doctrines, Kazakh biis’, rhetors’, akyns’, zhyraus’ teachings as well, till Abay Kunanbayev’s and Shakarim Kudayberdiyev’s doctrines.

Philosophy has its own place in the spiritual culture of any people being the quintessense of its holistic worldview. It is necessary to mention that during centuries the sufism and its religious system of values made a noticeable sway on the national philosophy. Because the Sufi thinkers tried to find the latent of a man’s puport of life. Defining a man as the most universal being, the sufis pay their main attention to the self – analysis, self – observation, intuitive comprehension of the truth.

The great thinkers of the Kazakh steppe Abay and Shakarim tried to solve the problems of the moral perfection of a man by the humanization of the social – ethnical space. In the Kazakh thinkers’ of the XX century opinion a man is not be born morally deprived naturally, but his negative qualities are formed in social space. That is why Abay puts forward as a chief concept of his doctrine the ethical principle "Adam bol!" (Be a human!), and for Shakarim the conscience is the main ethical category in his conception of a man’s spiritual perfection. Conscience as an important notion in his worldview is the main regulator of the interpersonal relations.

The great Kazakh scientist, orientalist, historian, ethnographer, geographer, folklorist, educator, democrat. In his short life Shokan Ualikhanov left many valuable works dedicated to social and political structure, history, geography, ethnography and folklore of the peoples of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. He was the first who provided the information that Balkhash and Alakol once represented a single water surface, and on the special flow of wind from Dzungaria gate. After a review of the work "Khan zharlygyna" Shokan researched the work of K. Zhalairi "Jami-al-tavarikh" translated the main sections from this document to the Russian language, and compiled a dictionary of oriental terms, based on them.

He wrote a work entitled "Genealogy of the Kazakhs", based on the works of Abulgazy "Shaibani-name", "Shezhre-and -turk", the theoretical value of which is high. Shokan considered the work "Jami-at-tavarikh" as an unique historical work, a collection of historical legends of Kazakhs in XV-XVI-XVII centuries. Later studying the books "Babur-name", "Tarikh-i-Rashidi" he appropriately used the information obtained therefrom, in his writings. Until the end of his life he was considered as an employee of the General Staff and the Asian Department. Disease progressed and Shokan Ualikhanov died in the village Koshentogan, Tezek settlement, at the foot of the Altynemel ridge.

The works of Shokan Ualikhanov, which have made a significant contribution to the various branches of science of its time, are highly appreciated at all times.

Abay Kunanbayev - poet and philosopher. Hegel wrote that philosophy is an epoch grasped in thought. However, to grasp in thought the era, it must be a thinker in the highest sense of the word. Abay Kunanbayev was among one of these thinkers in the second half of 19th century in Kazakhstan.

In this case, under thinker we do not mean someone who works as a monk locked in a narrow cell, delving into ancient manuscripts and trying to fish out some important laws of social development. Despite that Abay belonged to the elite of Kazakh society, he never fenced himself from the disaster and needs ofordinary people. On the contrary, as a philosopher, he lived with what his people lived, shared with them their pain and deprivation. Joys were little, but how he could live and enjoy himself? Abay's feat, in fact his whole life was a real feat and only about the interest of his people, their pain reflected on his big heart, the heart of philosopher and person. 

Wealth and cattle did not concern him. As a thinker and patriot of his homeland, his heart was crying blood, as he knew all the needs and hopes of his people in order to be satisfied with surroundings. 

Communication with exiled Russian social democrats, E.P.Mihoelisom, N.Dolgopolovym and S.Grossom, gave impetus to his potential abilities. Abay's treatment of Russian literature, which experienced creativeimpulse at that time, was natural, where poetic in Eastern tradition was treated very high.

Morality and languages take paramount part at Abay's universal system. He considered that language opens a window into the vast world. Humanity and liberality oblige learn languages of other nations, as only in this way for  human-thinker can feel a connection with the geniuses of the spiritual world.

There are dozens of definitions of man. Certainly, the most acceptable usually relies on scientific: representative of the genus homosapiens. However, is it always that every man justifies such a flattering definition? It is says, that, person is that and that, but sometimes it represented that every definition is not accurate, as some people born to manage and others to obey. They are majority, but Abay as peak of mountain rises high above drab existence of reality of his time.

Abay did not become a follower of German philosophers, despite that he learned their works, for instance, Feurbach's anthropological materialism. On the contrast, he considered the anatomical structure of the human bodies and its organs not as a product of nature, but as a result of the creative activity of God, his wisdom and love to humans. On the other hand, such worldview position did not prevent him to represent a man as unique and high product of his philosophy.

Abay absorbed much of that carried the eastern and Arab culture: the Quran, the thousand and one nights. He was familiar with the works of Ferdowsi, Nizami, Saadi and Navoi, studied the works of Aristotle, Socrates, Spinoza and Spencer.

Poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Goethe, Byron and Schiller was extremely congenial to him. As well as he wanted to be introduce his people with top of the world spirit. In his translation into Kazakh languages Abay subtly conveyed the spirit of poems and adapted them into the outlook of his fellow tribesmen.

Within 20 years Abay bloomed as versatile genius. He won extraordinary authority and popularity which were unknown in steppe before. He was surrounded by Akyns (oral improvising poets), singers, composers and young talented people, socio-philosophical and literary schools being established.  

Abay's moral and ethical views were not just a figment of his imagination over the observation of life and social system of Kazakhs. Abay thoroughly studied the works of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, as well as works of German philosophers of modern times like Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach. 

Ethical and aesthetic problems, despite their importance could not be resolved without reference to the decision of the more common questions of philosophy. One of such issue was the question of a common basis of existence and cognition, God and man.

Wise Abay used to love to repeat the words of the Prophet Muhammad: "A good man is one that benefits the people" ["Gakliya" - "Words of edification", the thirty-eighth word] these words can be applied to him but not anyone else.

The essay "Gakliya"("Words of edification") or "Kara soz" (“Book of words”), take a special place in the Abay's art. Under these name combined forty five "Words" - small, carefully crafted, artistic, stylistic completed fragments. The term "penalty" (Black) in combination with the term "Soz" ("The Word") is extremely polysemous. This symbolize sadness, prose, unlike rhymed speech and text. As well as it means something significant, important and paramount in the Turkic tradition.

“Book of words” it is also direct appeal to the readers, like conversation and open talk, unique work “of observation of the cold mind and sorrowful heart markings” and philosophy of life of individual on the background of destiny.

“Book of words” by genre similar to what in Genghis Khan’s tradition called "Bilik" –is a precise expression, a story about life example, having the shape of the sample.

The name “Book of words” or “Words of edification” of Abay, inaccurately transfers the meaning of the philosopher. In European tradition, “Book of words” belongs to the genre of aphorisms and maxims. In fact, it is confession – extremely deep and responsible genre, which requires integrity and sincerity from the writer, in other way, we are facing with “nakedness of soul” of man, poet and philosopher. 

Forty five “Words of edification” is the philosophical reflection of the poet about life problems and deeply sad “face to face” conversation with his audience. Addressing to them, the poet ask himself: maybe “Should I rule the people?”, “Should I multiply knowledge?”, “Should I do religious rites? or “Should I educate the children?”. 

Finally, in this way Abay explains his decision to write down “own thoughts”: “Paper and ink from now on will be my consolation…Maybe someone will like some of my word and he will rewrite it for himself or just remember. If not, then my words, as it says, will stay with me [First word].

Many lines from the “Book of words” became immortal: “Man born crying and grieves when he leaves” [Fourth word]; “Man becomes intellectual, remembering the words of the wises” [Nineteenth word]; “He who seeks praise from loved ones, I am sure he will achieve it, praising and lifting up himself to heaven”[Twenty first word]; “Scientist and philosopher are the pride of humanity. They are those who have more senses and mind. We do not invent science, it appears as a result of our feelings, observation and thoughts about the creation around us and organized world for us” [Word forty third].

On the behalf of Socrates Abay in the “Book of words” said about what he thought thoroughly before, disputing with Aristotle, the philosopher says: “Certainly, you will agree, that the top creation of the creator is a man. However, does not the creator give him five senses, being confident in their necessities for man? Do you find that a man has random organs?

For example, we have eyes to see. If they were not existed, could we enjoy the beauty of the world?  Eyes are gentle and there are eyelids to keep them. They open and close when it necessary from a wind and mote, whereas eyebrows withdraw sweats trickling down from forehead. If ears were not existed, people would not be able to hear noise, rattling, would not be able to guard against rustling or cry and would not have enjoyed the sounds of songs or tunes. If a nose does not smell, people would not able stretch incense and turn away from stench. He would not care. Finally, if a person would not have palate and tongue, he would be able to recognize sweetness or bitterness of food. Is that all bad for human?

Eyes and nose are located not far from mouth to man to see purity and could smell a food. However, other necessary to person holes, which spew out waste from body and located away from the head. “Could it be possible to say that it’s all random manifestation of the mind of the creator?” [Wordtwentyseventh]

If only in science everything was so clear, so that to know with confidence in which direction to go and what to do. When we are in trouble, we can always rely on a help of wise, we just need to turn to him: “Once power, mind and heart argued, who among them is necessary to person. After they found out that cannot reach the agreement, they turned to Science for help. As I said, get together let heart guide you! If this happens and all of you gather in one person, so he will become righteous.  Dust from the soles of his feet will heal the blinds. Harmony and purity of life is the main meaning of the great world. If you won’t be able to unite, then I will give preference to the heart – the king of human life, thus Science resolve the dispute” [Word seventeenth].

 “Words of edification” is like conclusion and result of life. “Lived I good life up until now, but when we can already see the end of the path, when the soul exhausted and tired. I am convinced that my good intentions being ineffective in the vanity and frailty of human life.

“I am truly dead, despite that I am exist. I cannot understand the reason: whether weak disappointment to relatives, whether in the rejection of himself or something else. In appearance I am quite healthy, as dead inside. Even if laugh I do not feel joy. No matter what I tell you, if I laugh - all this as not mine, but someone else”.

“I do not understand how do I treat my nation: do I dislike or love them? – If I loved them, without any doubt I would agree its morals and among other characters found out even one to be proud of. My love would not allow the faith to go out, as if my people have such qualities inherent of great people. However, I do not have that faith”, – draws a line Abay.

Nine years passed before Abay wrote forty-five “Words-talks”, and expressed in them innermost thoughts, aspirations, mournful complaints indifferent to the poet’s voice contemporaries. “Life is lived – I argued, fought, judged, having only troubles and exhausted on them, tired and convinced in aimlessness of everything done”.

Abay Kunanbayev is the great poet, writer, public figure, founder of modern Kazakh literature, reformer of culture in the spirit of rapprochement with Russian and European culture on the basis of enlightened Islam.

Shakarim Kudaiberdiev-philosopher and thinker, scholar and poet. Shakarim knew very well the works of the Russian and foreign poets and writers and absorbed the spirit of the folk poetry from childhood. He loved very much works by Lev Tolstoi, Alexander Pushkin and Byron. He studied the works of scientists and philosophers from Democritus to Newton. In the “Three Truths” work, which Shakarim had been creating for 30 years, he enters into an argument with Darwin and Rousseau and gets delighted by Archimedes and Plato. This book became a priceless heirloom, which represents the pinnacle of philosophical thought in Kazakhstan in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Shakarim introduced the concept of “Science of conscience”. A magnificent connoisseur of Abai’s creative life, the successor of his traditions, he was deeply imbued with his conceptual ideas, developing them, enriching the vocabulary of philosophical category of the “science of conscience”. In all his works the problem of conscience was becoming the main theme. 

The knowledge of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages opened him the world of classical oriental poetry by Ferdowsi, Nizami, Fuzuli, Hafez. The pinnacle of the translation creativity of Shakarim was the “Leili and Majnun” poem, written explanation of the eastern parables. The poem went beyond the scope of the translated works. Scientists, researchers and professionals believe that it is the original and independent work. The story was adapted for the Kazakh reader. The lyrical narrative was interwoven with the Kazakh ballad in terms of its lyrical rhythm. A beautiful, melodic language, apt epithets, metaphors, a fascinating storyline made this poem a masterpiece of lyric poetry with an epic scale.

By autumn of 1931 the campaign of the Soviet government to confiscate property of prosperous farmers had come to an end. The collectivisation of agriculture in the Semipalatinsk region, and indeed everywhere, turned into cattle plague and famine. By this time Shakarim, renouncing the world, became increasingly reclusive and spent most of his time in his winter quarters. The new government had eliminated the educated, respectable people who could be leaders of the steppe. Having exterminated the most prominent, influential people and the elders, the new Soviet regime also destroyed the most enlightened, educated members of the nation, those who are popularly called “the salt of the earth”.   

Numerous complaints revealed to him the injustice of the world. Neither his mind, nor heart could accept the colonial policy of the tsarist government. According to historians Shakarim was at the center of social and political events that are closely related to the activities of Alikhan Bukeykhanov. 

Required reading:

1. Balasagun J. Kutti bilik. – Almaty: Jazuchy, 1986. – 416 p.

2. Abay, “Book of word”.Almaty, 1992. 

3. Margulan, A. Main stages of life and activities of Ch. Valikhanov, Selected work, Nauka, 1986.

4. Essay on the life and activities of Ch. Valikhanov// Ch. Valikhanov, collection of works in five volumes, Alma-Ata, 1984, p. 9-79.

5. Valihanov, C.H., Collected works in 5 volumes. Alma-Ata. 1961-1964.

1. ValikhanovCh, The traces of Shamanism among the Kirghiz // Ch.Valikhanov. Selected works. M., 1986.

2. Traditional world outlook of Turks in South Siberia. Space and Time. Novosibirsk, 1988.

3. Abdildin Zh., Abdildina R. "The Great steppe and the world outlook of traditional Kazakh"/ Eurasian Community: Economy, Politics, Security. 1997, 13, pp. 13-14.

4. Alpamys-Batyr. The Kazakh heroic epos is retold by A. Seidimbekov. Alma-Ata, 1981.

5. Al-Farabi. Historical-philosophical Works. Almaty, 1985.

6. Kljachtorny S.G., Sultanov T.I. Kazakhstan: the annals of three millennia. Alma-Ata, 1992.

Optional reading:

1. Garrone, P. 1999. “Baksylyk: A Muslim Declination of Shamanism”, Isim Newsletter 4: 99, 15.

2. Yesim Garifolla, 2003. Past in the present (the experience of philosophical prose). - Almaty.

3. Kendirbaeva, G., Folklore and Folklorism in Kazakhstan // Asian Folklore Studies’ 53: 97-123.

1. Imangaliev A.I. Kazakh horse. – Almaty, 1976.

2. AyazbekovaS.Sh, Cultural and Philosophical Analysis of Music in the Picture of the World of the Kazkhs. Almaty, 2004.

3. Radlov, V.V. Turkish Epics and Causasus. Moscow, 2009.

4. Ethnic and religious identity of youth in Kazakhstan. Main results of the survey of the Republican. - Astana, 2007.

5. Aytaliev A. Ulttanu (Oku kurali). - Almaty: Aris, 2000.

6. Shakarim and Kayum. Foliant, 2009. Astana,

1. Features and main themes of Russian philosophical thought.

2. Slavophilism and Westernism.

3. Russian religious philosophy

Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to the flowering of philosophy as a purely theoretical discipline; academic philosophy was hence a latecomer on the Russian scene, and those (such as the Neo-Kantians of the end of the nineteenth century) who devoted themselves to questions of ontology and epistemology were widely condemned for their failure to address the country’s pressing social problems.

Since Peter the Great’s project of Westernization, Russian philosophy has been primarily the creation of writers and critics who derived their ideals and values from European sources and focused on ethics, social theory and the philosophy of history, in the belief that (as Marx put it in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) philosophers had hitherto merely interpreted the world: the task was now to change it.

What Berdiaev called the ‘Russian Idea’ – the eschatological quest that is the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance.

Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity. ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world.

Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker G. Skovoroda (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid-century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French Enlightenment ideas.

But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo. The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self-image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground.

Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists N. Herzen and M. Bakunin, the novelist and liberal I. Turgenev, the literary critic V. Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers I. Kireevskii and A. Khomiakov.

As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice.

The question of history’s goal became a matter for intense debate among the intelligentsia with the publication in 1836 of P. Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society. 

Secular and Westernist thinkers tended to be scarcely less messianic in their response to Chaadaev’s pessimism.

The first philosophers of Russian liberalism interpreted their country’s past and future development in the light of Hegel’s doctrine of the necessary movement of all human societies towards the incarnation of Reason in the modern constitutional state, while the Russian radical tradition was shaped successively by the eschatological visions of the French utopian socialists, the Young Hegelians and K. Marx. 

Herzen defined the distinctive characteristic of Russian radical thought as the ‘implacable spirit of negation’ with which, unrestrained by the European’s deference to the past, it applied itself to the task of freeing mankind from the transcendent authorities invented by religion and philosophy; and the radical populist tradition that he founded argued that the ‘privilege of backwardness’, by permitting Russia to learn both from the achievements and the mistakes of the West, had placed it in the vanguard of mankind’s movement towards liberty.

Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals.

Vladimir Soloviov (regarded by many Russians as their greatest philosopher) believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar.

His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour.

Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as S. Frank, M.Bulgakov (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), N. Berdiaev (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and Hessen, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’.

A number of émigré philosophers (notably Iliin and Vysheslavtsev) interpreted Bolshevism as the expression of a spiritual crisis in modern industrialized cultures.

Many blamed the Russian Revolution on infection from a culturally bankrupt West which (echoing the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii and K. Leontiev) they presented as corrupted by rationalism, positivism, atheism and self-centred individualism (although few have gone as far as the fiercely polemical Losev who, up until his death in the Soviet Union in 1988, maintained that electric light expressed the spiritual emptiness of ‘Americanism and machine-production’).

Most maintained a historiosophical optimism throughout the catastrophes of the first half of the 20^th century, which Berdiaev saw as a precondition for messianic regeneration, while Hessen believed that religious and cultural values would emerge triumphant from the carnage in a dialectical Aufhebung.

Some radical philosophers (such as N. Berdiaev and S. Frank), in the process of moving from Marxism to neo-idealism, sought to reconcile Nietzsche’s aesthetic immoralism with Christian ethics, while the ‘Empiriocriticist’ group of Bolsheviks attempted to inject Russian Marxist philosophy with an element of heroic voluntarism by synthesizing it with Nietzschean self-affirmation and the pragmatism of Ernst Mach. Nietzschean influences combined with the mechanistic scientism of Soviet Marxism in the Soviet model of the ‘new man’ (whose qualities Lysenko’s genetics suggested could be inherited by successive generations).

In the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ some Soviet philosophers, including E. Ilienkov and M. Mamardashvili, began a critical rereading of Marx’s texts from an anthropocentric standpoint which emphasized the unpredictable and limitless potential of human consciousness.

The nihilists, who rejected metaphysics and all that could not be proven by rational and empirical methods, fervently believed that progress would inevitably lead to the restoration of a natural state of harmony between the individual and society.

The empiriocriticist movement within Russian Marxism opposed the idolatry of formulas with the claim that experience and practice were the sole criteria of truth, but the group’s leading philosopher, A. Bogdanov, looked forward to a metascience that would unify the fragmented world of knowledge by reducing ‘all the discontinuities of our experience to a principle of continuity’, predicting that under communism, when all would share the same modes of organizing experience, the phenomenon of individuals with separate mental worlds would cease to exist.

Soloviov’s pervasive influence on subsequent Russian religious idealism owed much to the charms of his vision of ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘integral life’ in an ‘integral society’.

Religious and socialist motifs were combined in some visions of an earthly paradise, such as Bulgakov’s ‘Christian Socialism’, or Gorkii’s and Lunarcharskii’s creed of ‘God-building’, which called for worship of the collective humanity of the socialist future.

In the revolutionary ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century many religious and radical philosophers, together with Symbolist writers and poets, envisaged the leap to the harmonious future in apocalyptic terms: the novelist and critic D. Merezhkovskii prophesied the coming of a ‘New Christianity’ which would unite Christian faith with pagan self-affirmation in a morality beyond good and evil.

In the aftermath of 1917 some thinkers (notably Berdiaev and members of the Eurasian movement) found consolation in apocalyptic fantasies of a new light from the East shining on the ruins of European culture.

L.Tolstoi pointed to the chanciness of life and history in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of all attempts to formulate general rules for human societies; F. Dostoevskii confronted the systematizers with the lived experience of human freedom as the ability to be unpredictable; in their symposium of 1909 (frequently cited in the West as a pioneering analysis of the psychology of political utopianism) the neo-idealists of the Signposts movement explored the ways in which obsession with an ideal future impoverishes and distorts perception of the historical present.

Under the Soviet system a few representatives of this anti-utopian tradition ingeniously evaded the pressure on philosophers (backed up by the doctrine of the ‘partyness’ of truth) to endorse the official myths of utopia in power. The history of the novel form was the vehicle for Bakhtin’s reflections on the ‘unfinalizability’ of human existence (M.M. Bakhtin); similar insights were expressed by the cultural-historical school of psychology established by L. Vygotskii, who drew on Marx to counter the mechanistic determinism of Soviet Marxist philosophy with a view of consciousness as a cultural artefact capable of self-transcendence and self-renewal.

In the 1960s Soviet psychologists and philosophers such as Il’enkov helped to revive an interest in ethics with their emphasis on the individual as the centre of moral agency, while in its historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic signs, the Moscow-Tartu school brought a richly documented and undoctrinaire approach to important moral and political topics.

The insights of some of these individuals and movements into the attractions and delusions of utopian thought are lent added conviction by their own often spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to overcome what Nietzsche called ‘the craving for metaphysical comfort’. Tolstoi was torn all his life beween his pluralist vision and his need for dogmatic moral certainties, while Dostoevskii in his last years preached an astonishingly crude variety of religio-political messianism. The humanism of some later religious philosophers (including the Signposts authors Berdiaev and Bulgakov) is hard to reconcile with their eschatological impatience.

Required reading:

1. Solovyov, Vladimir. The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists), trans. by Boris Jakim, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996.

2. Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Divine Humanity, ed. by Boris Jakim, Lindisfarne Press, 1995.

3. Berdyaev, Nicholas, Truth and Revelation, tr. R.M. French (New York: Collier Books 1962).

4. Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Russian Idea. Translated by R. M. French. Boston, 1962.

5. Lossky, Nicholas O. History of Russian Philosophy, New York, 1972.

6. Zenkovsky, V. V. A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, London, 1967.

7. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.

8. Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.

9. A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930. G. M. Hamburg, Randall A. Poole (eds.). Minnesota, 2013. ISBN: 9781107612785.

Optional reading:

1. Copleston, Frederick C. Philosophy in Russia, From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, Notre Dame, 1986.

2. Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Stanford, 1979.

3. Helmut Dahm, Vladimir Solovyev and Max Scheler: Attempt at a Comparative Interpretation, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1975.

4. Zdenek V. David, "The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought," Slavic Review, 21(1962), 1, pp. 43-64.

5. Aleksej Losev, Vladimir Solov'ev, Moscow: Mysl', 1983.

6. Joseph L. Navickas, "Hegel and the Doctrine of Historicity of Vladimir Solovyov," in The Quest for the Absolute, ed.

7. Louis J. Shein, "V.S. Solov'ev's Epistemology: A Re-examination," Canadian Slavic Studies, Spring 1970, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-16.

Lecture 11. Ontology: the problem of unity of the world

1. Correlation of being and non-being as the basic question of metaphysics

2. Matter as the substance of everything that exists

3. The unity of matter and motion: the concept of space and time

Matter is everything that surrounds us, which exists outside our consciousness, that does not depend on our consciousness, and that is or may be reflected directly or indirectly in consciousness. All the sciences study certain properties and relations of specific forms of matter, but not matter in its most general sense. The philosophical understanding of matter retains its significance whatever the discoveries of natural science. The concept of matter does not epistemologically mean anything except objective reality existing independently of human consciousness. Moreover, matter is the only existing objective reality: the cause, foundation, content and substance of all the diversity of the world.

Some philosophical theories have maintained positions of dualism-acknowledging two parallel but independent worlds, the world of the spirit and the world of matter.

Some philosophers see the unity of objects and processes in their reality, that is, in the fact that they exist. This is indeed the general principle that unites everything in the world. But can the very fact of existence be regarded as a basis for the unity of the world? This depends on how reality itself is interpreted, what is meant by reality: existence may be material or spiritual, imaginary. The theologians, for example, believe that God is real, that he exists but does not possess objective reality. He is unimaginable. Our feelings, thoughts, aspirations and aims are also real-they exist. Yet this is not objective but subjective existence. If existence is the basis of the unity of the world, then it is so only if we are talking about not subjective but objective existence.

The unity of the world is expressed in the classification of the sciences, which records the connections between them that have objective content. The infinite universe, both in great things and in small, in the material and the spiritual spheres consistently obeys universal laws that connect every thing in the world and make it a single whole. The principle of materialist monism also applies to society. Social being determines social consciousness. Materialist monism rejects views that single out consciousness and reason as a special substance contrasted to nature and society. Consciousness is, in fact, cognition of reality and a part of that reality. There is no gulf between the laws that govern the motion of the world, and human consciousness. Consciousness belongs not to any transcendental world but to the material world. It is not a supernatural unicum but a natural attribute of highly organised matter.

Matter is the cause and basis of the entire world's diversity. It holds all the secrets of existence and all the ways of knowing them. The category of matter is reality rich in colours and forms. Its cognition begins when we state that an object exists without yet knowing its attributes. Acknowledgement of matter as the substance of everything that exists is a crucial methodological principle.

The universal connection and interaction forms an attributive definition of substance and presupposes the mutual reflection and circulation of information in the universe. The concept of information has gradually expanded to embrace not only human communication but also the communication between living organisms and the various systems in each organism, the mechanisms of heredity, and finally, the physical objects, the entire surrounding world. The phenomenon of information may today be regarded as an all-embracing attribute of matter in motion, as the definition of all the interactions in the world.

Motion is the mode of existence of matter. To be means to be in motion. The world is integrating and disintegrating. It never attains ultimate perfection. Like matter, motion is uncreatable and indestructible. It is not introduced from outside but is included in matter, which is not inert but active. Motion is self-motion in the sense that the tendency, the impulse to change of state is inherent in matter itself: it is its own cause.

The forms and kinds of motion are manifold. They are connected with the levels of the structural organisation of matter. The basic forms are motion of elementary particles, appearance and interaction of atoms and molecules, the chaotic displacement of particles in the form of heat motion, the mechanical motion of macroscopic bodies, the biological motion with all its diverse manifestations, the life of human society and, finally, a quite conceivable metasocial form of motion in the shape of extremely intricate connections between various civilisations on a cosmic scale. Every form of motion has its "vehicle"-substratum. Thus elementary particles are the material vehicles of the diverse processes of intermutations. The elements of the atomic nucleus are the material vehicles of the nuclear form of motion, the elements of the atom, of intra-atomic form of motion, the elements of molecules and molecular compounds, of the chemical form of motion, and so on up to the social form of motion, which is the highest of all known forms.

Space and time are universal forms of the existence of matter, the coordination of objects. The universality of these forms lies in the fact that they are forms of existence of all the objects and processes that have ever existed or will exist in the infinite universe. Not only the events of the external world, but also all feelings and thoughts take place in space and time. In the material world everything has extension and duration. Space and time have their peculiarities. Space has three dimensions: length, breadth and height, but time has only one-from the past through the present to the future. It is inevitable, unrepeatable and irreversible.

The idea of absolute space and time corresponded to the physical picture of the world, namely the system of views of matter as a set of atoms separated from each other, possessing immutable volume and inertia (mass), and influencing each other instantaneously either at a distance or through contact. Revision of the physical picture of the world changed the view of space and time.

To sum up, everything in the world is spatial and temporal. Space and time are absolute. But since these are forms of matter in motion, they are not indifferent to their content. When it moves, an object does not leave an empty form behind it, space is not an apartment that can be let out to such a tenant as matter, and time cannot be compared to some monster that gnaws at things and leaves its tooth marks on them. Space and time are conditioned by matter, as a form is conditioned by its content, and every level of the motion of matter possesses its space-time structure. Thus living cells and organisms, in which geometry becomes more complex and the rhythm of time changes, possess special space-time properties. This is biological time. There is also historical time, whose unit may be the replacement of one generation by another, which corresponds to a century. Depending on our practical needs, historical time is counted in centuries and millennia. The reference point may be certain cultural-historical events or even legends.

Required reading:

1. Baker, L.R., 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Chalmers, D., Manley, D. and Wasserman, R., 2009, Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

3. Hirsch, E., 2005, “Physical-Object Ontology, Verbal Disputes, and Common Sense,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70: 67–97.

4. Koslicki, K., 2008, The Structure of Objects, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. Lowe, E. J., 2006, The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

6. Putnam, H., 2004, Ethics Without Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7. Schaffer, Jonathan, 2010, Monism: The Priority of the Whole, Philosophical Review, 119. 31-76.

8. Sider, T., 2012, Writing the Book of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Optional reading:

1. Leibesman, D. and Eklund, M., 2007, “Sider on existence,” Noûs, 41: 519–528.

2. McGrath, M., 2005, “No Objects, no Problem?,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83: 457–486.

3. Parsons, J., 2004, “Dion, Theon, and DAUP,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 85: 85–91.

4. Rea, M., 2000, “Constitution and Kind Membership,” Philosophical Studies, 97: 169–93.

5. Shoemaker, S., 2003, “Realization, Micro-Realization, and Coincidence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67: 1–23.

6. Schaffer, J., 2003, “Is there a Fundamental Level?,” Noûs, 37: 498–517.

7. Sider, T., 2009, “Ontological Realism,” in D. Chalmers, D. Manley, and R. Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 384–423.

8. Uzquiano, G., 2004, “Plurals and Simples,” The Monist, 87: 429–451.

Lecture 12. Dialectics as a doctrine of the universal connection

1. Dialectics as the concept of universal connection.

2. Categories as objective and ideal forms of identity of being and thinking.

3. Law as a general and essential relation.

Nothing in the world stands by itself. Every object is a link in an endless chain and is thus connected with all the other links. And this chain of the universe has never been broken; it unites all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character. We cannot move so much as our little finger without "disturbing" the whole universe. The life of the universe, its history lies in an infinite web of connections.

Interaction is a process by which various objects influence each other, their mutual conditioning or transmutation and also their generation of one another. Interaction is a kind of immediate or mediate, external or internal relationship or connection. The properties of an object may manifest themselves and be cognised only through its interconnection with other objects.

Development. Any type of connection or interaction must take a certain direction. Nothing in the world is final and complete. Everything is on the way to somewhere else. Development is a definitely oriented, irreversible change of the object, from the old to the new, from the simple to the complex, from a lower level to a higher one. Development is irreversible. Nothing passes through one and the same state more than once. Development is a dual process: the old is destroyed and replaced by something new, which establishes itself in life not simply by freely evolving its own potential but in conflict with the old.

Dialectics and metaphysics. Dialectics is a theory of the most general connections of the universe and its cognition and also the method of thinking based on this theory. Anyone who wants to find a rational orientation in the world and change the world must have knowledge of the dialectics of life and thought.

Dialectics arose and develops historically in a struggle against the metaphysical method, which is characteristically one-sided and abstract and inclined to absolutise certain elements within the whole. Metaphysical views have taken various historical forms. While Heraclitus stressed one aspect of existence-the changeability of things, which the Sophists extended to complete relativism, the Eleatic philosophers in their criticism of the Heraclitean principle of flux, concentrated on another aspect, on the stability of existence and went to another extreme in supposing that everything was changeless. Thus, some philosophers dissolved the world in a fiery flux while others crystallised it into immovable rock.

In modern times metaphysics has taken the form of an absolutising of the analysis and classification techniques in the cognition of nature. Because they are constantly repeated in scientific research, the techniques of analysis, experimental isolation and classification have gradually imparted to scientific thinking certain general ideas suggesting that in nature's "workshop" objects exist in isolation, as it were, apart from one another. As philosophy and the specialised sciences have developed the focus of the struggle between dialectics and metaphysics has shifted from attempts to explain the connection of things to interpretation of the principle of development. Here metaphysical thought emerged at first in the form of simple evolutionism, and then in various concepts of "creative evolution". .

Categories. In philosophy, categories are extremely general, fundamental concepts reflecting the most essential, law-governed connections and relationships of reality. Categories are the forms and stable organising principles of the thought process and, as such, they reproduce the properties and relations of existence in global and most concentrated form. Categories are the result of generalisation, of the intellectual synthesis of the achievements of science and socio-historical practice and are, therefore, the key points of cognition, the moments when thought grasps the essence of things. This is the starting-point for the analysis of the diversity (individual and particular, part and whole, form and content, etc.).

The system and its elements. A system is an internally organised whole where elements are so intimately connected that they operate as one in relation to external conditions and other systems. An element may be defined as the minimal unit performing a definite function in the whole. Systems may be either simple or complex. A complex system is one whose elements may also be regarded as systems or subsystems. All things, properties and relations that strike us as something independent are essentially parts of some system, which in its turn is part of an even bigger system, and so on ad infinitum. For example, the whole of world civilisation is no more than a large and extremely complex self-developing system, which comprises other systems of varying degrees of complexity.

The concept of structure. The aim of scientific cognition is to discover law-governed relations between the elements forming a given system. In the process of this research we identify the structures peculiar to that system. When studying the content of an object, we enumerate its elements such as, for example, the parts of a certain organism. But we do not stop at that, we try to understand how these parts are coordinated and what is made up as a result, thus arriving at the structure of the object. Structure is the type of connection between the elements of a whole. It has its own internal dialectic. Wholeness must be composed in a certain way, its parts are always related to the whole. It is not simply a whole but a whole with internal divisions. Structure is a composite whole, or an internally organised content.

Structure and function. The life of a structure manifests itself in its function, they condition each other. The structures of the organs of the body, for instance, are connected with their functions. Any breakdown in structure, any deformation of an organ leads to a distortion of the function. In the development of organisms changes begin with the reorganisation of an organ's function under the influence of changing conditions of life, while its structure may survive for a time without any substantial modification. However, change of activity sooner or later leads to a change in structure. Functional disturbances in organs precede their morphological distortions. The contradiction between the organism's new mode of life and its structure is resolved by a modification in the latter.

Whole and part. We call something a whole that embraces all its parts in such a way as to create a unity. The category of part expresses the object not in itself but as something in relation to what it is a part of, to that in which it realises its potentials and prospects. For example, an organ is part of an organism taken as a whole. Consequently, the categories of whole and part express a relationship between objects in which one object, being a complex and integral whole, is a unity of other objects which form its parts. A part is subject to the influence of the whole, which is present, as it were, in all its parts. Every part feels the influence of the whole, which seems to permeate the parts and exist in them.

Content and form. We have defined content as the identity of the components of the whole with the whole itself. Now let us consider form. The category of form is used in the sense of external appearance, that is to say, the boundaries of the given content, its outward posture, in the sense of structure, and also in the sense of the mode of expression and existence of the content. Form is often defined in such a way that it coincides with structure, although these are different concepts.

The concept of essence and phenomenon. Essence is closely related to content. In fact, it is content, but not the whole content, only the main, basic part of it. Essence is related to all categories, to quality, for example. But quality does not exhaust essence. It expresses only one of its aspects. To reveal essence one must discover measure or proportion, the unity of quality and quantity. The path to essence lies through the categories of cause and law. Essence is an integral category, which embraces structure, part and whole, individual, particular and general, content and quality, proportion, contradiction, causality and law; it may also be regarded as an interweaving of the laws of the existence and functioning of an object. As the fundamental basis of the existence of an object essence manifests itself fully or partially, in the form of mere appearance-as a phenomenon.

Phenomenon as the external aspect is based on the internal essence. It is that in which the principle has expressed itself. What matters for a phenomenon is the result of the functioning of the principle as essence. The categories of essence and phenomenon characterise the interdependence of processes that take place in reality and the level to which thought has penetrated its object, whether we are still only on the surface or have broken through to the essence. A phenomenon usually expresses only some facet of essence, one of its aspects. For example, many manifestations of the essence of a certain type of malignant tumour may have been well researched, but its essence still remains an ominous secret.

Appearance. A phenomenon may or may not correspond to its essence, and this may happen to varying degrees. Appearance is supported by essence but does not always correspond to it. Appearance is essence in one of its definitions, aspects, or moments. In art, for example, appearance is the result of one or another form of discrepancy between phenomenon and essence, aim and the means, action and result, a discrepancy between what a person is in fact, and what he wishes to appear, or claims to be; essence reveals the comic side in appearance.

The individual, the general and the particular. Things differ from each other and in themselves. We speak of things as being as alike as two drops of water. But look at them through a microscope and those drops turn out to be different. There are no doubles in the world, though its population runs into billions. Every person is unique! Pure identity can exist only in formal terms.

The category of the particular is relative and fluid. In one relation the particular may more or less "approximate" to the general and act and be understood as something general in its connection with its own general nature. The particular "stands" midway between the general and the individual, holding them in its "embrace", as it were, and including them in itself.

Law as a general and essential relation. Everything is committed to a certain framework, like steel in its mould. When we speak of the laws of the universe we have in mind a certain regularity in the coming of events. Law is not an object, nor one of its properties, but a type of relations between objects. It organises the interconnection of the elements of a system. When speaking of a law we mean stable, repetitive, essential, necessary relations.

The discovery of laws is the basic task of science. Scientists constantly seek to establish regularity, "order", stable tendencies in phenomena, that is to say, laws. Man's power over the forces of the universe is proportional to the volume and depth of his knowledge of its laws.

The law-governed and the accidental. Everything that we observe is as it is and could not be otherwise. Accident is thus regarded as a purely subjective concept by which we designate something whose cause is unknown to us. As soon as a person discovers the cause of a phenomenon, it ceases to be accidental. It is true that there are no causeless phenomena in the world. Even accidental phenomena are causally conditioned. But this does not make them necessary. According to the concept of absolute necessity, which excludes chance, the final result of any process in the universe is preordained from the very beginning and must come about with inexorable force. Thus the final point of any process of development exists from the first in reality, like an "embryo" for whose development the process serves only as an external auxiliary factor, a "midwife".

When absolutised, necessity becomes its opposite: everything is a matter of chance and one must leave everything to chance. The offended vanity of an aggressor, the bad mood of a monarch, the whim of a woman, are sufficient cause for going to war, for throwing millions of people into the slaughter, destroying cities and plunging nations into poverty and grief, spreading disaster and despair for many centuries. We are thus faced with a false alternative. Either the world is ruled only by chance and then there can be no necessity, or else there is no chance and the world is ruled by necessity. In actual fact, both in nature and society, where chance appears to dominate, it is in reality subordinate to certain laws. But not everything that happens does so of necessity. Much occurs by chance. Chance has its share of "right" to existence.

Probability as the measure of realisation of chance. Probability is a degree of possibility, the extent to which a given event may be realised in given conditions and under a given law. It characterises the degree to which a certain possibility is grounded, the measure of its ability to become reality, the degree of its approximation to realisation, the ratio of favourable and unfavourable factors. Probability is not simply the measure of our expectation. It is an objective measure of the possibility of chance becoming reality. Probability tells us how likely an event is to happen, what the objective grounds are for its happening, or whether it may happen at all. More probable means a more justified possibility.

The real and the possible. The process of development is always connected with the passing of the possible into the real. Everything that exists is strictly and continually controlled by the law of the conservation of matter: nothing can come from nothing. The new must have premises in the old. The sources of the future lie both in the past and in the present. The person who exists in reality is preceded by his potential, by that which is given in the embryo. Everything arises from that which exists as a possibility but not as a reality.

Two factors are required for possibility to become reality: the operation of a certain law and the availability of appropriate conditions. People are born with exceptional possibilities in the form of their natural potentials. But these potentials can develop only under certain conditions. Any system contains more possibilities than it can actually realise. Everything that exists in reality is the result of this selection. Whether the result is a happy one is another question. No one can tell whether all this was inevitable. Sometimes we have to regret lost opportunities.

The concept of causality, determinism. All certainty in our relationships with the world rests on acknowledgement of causality. Causality is a genetic connection of phenomena through which one thing (the cause) under certain conditions gives rise to, causes something else (the effect). The essence of causality is the generation and determination of one phenomenon by another. In this respect causality differs from various other kinds of connection, for example, the simple temporal sequence of phenomena, of the regularities of accompanying processes.

Determinism proceeds from recognition of the diversity of causal connections, depending on the character of the regularities operating in a given sphere. Every level of the structural organisation of being has its own specific form of interaction of things, including its specific causal relation ships. Higher forms of causal relationships should never be reduced to lower forms. From a methodological point of view it is essential to take into account the qualitative peculiarities and level of the structural organisation of being.

The dialectical approach is incompatible with mechanistic determinism, which interprets all the diversity of causes only as mechanical interaction, ignoring the unique qualities of the regularities of various forms of the motion of matter. Determinism was given its classical expression by Laplace, who formulated it as follows: if a mind could exist that knew at any given moment about all the forces of nature and the points of application of those forces, there would be nothing of which it was uncertain and both future and past would be revealed to its mental vision.

Mechanistic determinism identifies cause with necessity and accident is completely ruled out. Such determinism leads to fatalism, to faith in an overruling destiny. The development of science has gradually ousted mechanistic determinism from the study of social life, organic nature, and the sphere of physics. It is applicable only in certain engineering calculations involving machines, bridges and other structures. But this kind of determinism cannot explain biological phenomena, mental activity, or the life of society.

Causality and purpose. The idea of teleology arises when a spontaneously operating cause comes to be regarded as a consciously acting cause, and even one that acts in a predetermined direction, that is to say, a goal-oriented cause. This implies that the ultimate cause or aim is the future, which determines the process taking place in the present. The doctrine that the universe as a whole is proceeding according to a certain plan cannot be proved empirically. The existence of an ultimate goal assumes that someone must have put it. Teleology therefore leads to theology.

The unity of opposites and contradiction. The opposite sides, elements and tendencies of a whole whose interaction forms a contradiction are not given in some eternally ready-made form. At the initial stage, while existing only as a possibility, contradiction appears as a unity containing an inessential difference. The next stage is an essential difference within this unity. Though possessing a common basis, certain essential properties or tendencies in the object do not correspond to each other. The essential difference produces opposites, which in negating each other grow into a contradiction. The extreme case of contradiction is an acute conflict. Opposites do not stand around in dismal inactivity; they are not something static, like two wrestlers in a photograph. They interact and are more like a live wrestling match. Every development produces contradictions, resolves them and at the same time gives birth to new ones. Life is an eternal overcoming of obstacles. Everything is interwoven in a network of contradictions.

The concepts of quality and property.  The category of quality is an integral definition of the functional unity of an object's essential properties, its internal and external definiteness, its relative stability, its distinction from and resemblance to other objects. Quality is an existing definiteness, as distinct from other definitenesses. It is the expression of the stable unity of an object's elements and structure. Quality is at the same time the limits of an object within which it exists as that object and no other. This means that quality is inseparable from the object. In losing its quality any object ceases to exist as such.

Every property is relative. In relation to wood steel is hard, but it is soft in relation to diamonds. Properties may be universal or specific, essential or inessential, necessary or accidental, internal or external, natural or artificial, and so on. The concept of quality is often used in the sense of an essential property. The higher the level of organisation of matter, the greater the number of qualities it possesses.

Quantity. Every group of homogeneous objects is a set. If it is finite it can be counted, or a dimension if it can be measured. Quantity expresses the external, formal relation of objects, their parts, their properties, their connections, number, dimension, set, element (unit), individual, class, degree of manifestation of this or that property. In order to establish the quantitative aspect of an object we compare its constituent elements-spatial measurements, rate of change, degree of development, using a certain standard as a unit of computation or measurement. The more complex the phenomenon, the more difficult it is to study it by quantitative methods.

Besides discreteness, which serves as the real premise for the concepts of quantity and number, it is important for an understanding of the objective basis of mathematics to realise that discrete things, their properties and relations, are united in sets.

Measure. Measure expresses unity of quality and quantity. For example, the atoms of various chemical elements are only distinguished from each other by the fact that their nuclei contain various quantities of protons. If we change the number of protons in the nucleus, we change that element into another. Every colour has its wavelength and corresponding frequency of oscillation. Every drug has its measure: its good or bad effect depends not only on its quality but also its quantity. One and the same chemical substance in various doses may stimulate growth or inhibit it.

The transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. The path of development in nature, society and consciousness is not a direct line, but a zigzag. Every turn signifies the appearance of new laws that hold good for that particular leg. The limits of these laws are by no means always clearly fixed, sometimes they are conditional. Who can determine the exact limits showing where childhood ends and adolescence begins, where youth begins and when it enters the quality known as "young person"?

The process of radical change of quality, the breakup of the old and the birth of the new is what we mean by a "leap". A leap is a spontaneous discharge of mounting tension, a resolving of contradictions. The passage of a phenomenon from one qualitative state to another is essentially contradictory; it is a unity of destruction and renewal, existence and non-existence, negation and affirmation. A leap includes the moment of cancellation of the previous phenomenon by the new. The transformation of one phenomenon into another is a unity, an interaction of quantitative and qualitative changes, which pass through a number of intermediate phases. Moreover, different phases of change in a given quality signify changes in the degree of the given quality, in other words a quantitative change.

Justified negation as an element of development. Everything obsolescent strives to renew itself and hold its ground in regenerated forms. Between the new and the old there is similarity or generality (otherwise we should have only a multiplicity of unconnected states), differences (with out transition to something else there is no development), coexistence, struggle, mutual negation, and the transmutation of the one into the other and vice versa. The new arises in the womb of the old, achieves a level incompatible with the old, and the latter is then negated. Sooner or later the old must die so that the young can live. The eternal play of life is as ruthless as death, as inevitable as birth. In the positive understanding of existence dialectics also includes understanding of its negation, its inevitable destruction.

Continuity. The concept of development is characterised by continuity, consistency, direction, irreversibility and the preservation of achieved results. Development is not the sum-total of separate successive states. If this were so, processes would have no duration and everything would remain in the present; there would be no continuation of the past in the present, and no development. The new, which negates and replaces the old as a result of self-development, constantly preserves the connection with the old, absorbs from it everything viable and necessary, and discards everything obsolete, everything that holds up progress. The emergent new cannot affirm itself without negation; nor can it do so without continuity. For example, a biological species survives and asserts itself only through the destruction of individuals, which in the process of procreation exhaust their purpose and, since they have nothing higher, go on to their death.

The idea of progress. The fact of progress is clearly and impressively recorded on the scrolls of history. Knowledge acquired by one generation is passed on to the next. In inorganic nature processes of development take place which do not, however, embrace all changes and cannot be reduced to an ascent from the lower to the higher. The processes of development include the formation of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cosmic systems.

The criterion of progress. A general criterion of progress is the perfecting, differentiation and integration of the elements of a system: elementary particles, atoms, molecules, micro-molecules. The criterion of progress consists in extension of possibilities of further development, its acceleration. As various forms of matter attain higher levels, the velocities of development increase.

The methodological and practical significance of this principle is important for an understanding of the general tendency of development and the connection between past and present that takes shape in the course of it. If the new arises out of the old and absorbs everything positive therein, it means that in both science and practice we must give due credit to the achievements of the past and critically accept its most valuable results.

Required reading:

1. Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic, tr. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols., 1929; tr. A. V. Miller, 1969; tr. George di Giovanni, 2010

2. Engels, Frederick, (1877) Anti-Dühring, Part I: Philosophy, XIII. Dialectics. Negation of the Negation.

3. Engels, Frederick, (1883) Dialectics of Nature. Marxists.org. Retrieved 2011-11-03.

4. Lenin, V.I., On the Question of Dialectics: A Collection, pp. 7-9. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980.

5. Berniker, Eli and McNabb, David E. (2006) 'Dialectical Inquiry: A Structured Qualitative Research Method', The Qualitative Report, 11(4): 642-664.

6. Ollman, Bertell. (1993) Dialectical Investigations New York: Routledge.

7. Rowan, John. (1981) 'A Dialectical Paradigm for Research', In: Peter Reason and John Rowan (eds.) Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research (93-112) New York: Routledge.

8. Beyleveld, D., 1991. Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Optional reading:

1. Kripke, S., 1971, “Identity and Necessity,” in M. Munitz (ed.), Identity and Individuation, New York: New York University Press, 83–94.

2. Lewis, D., 1976, “Survival and Identity,” in A. Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, Berkeley: University of California Press, 17–40.

3. Chisholm, R., 1973, “Parts as Essential to their Wholes,” Review of Metaphysics, 26: 581–603.

4. Parsons, J., 2004, “Dion, Theon, and DAUP,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 85: 85–91.

5. Paul, L.A., 2002, “Logical Parts,” Noûs, 36: 578–596.

6. Pfeifer, K., 1980, Actions and Other Events: The Unifier-Multiplier Controversy, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Lecture 13. Epistemology. Consciousness as a philosophical problem

1. The general concept of thought and the problem of knowability of reality.

2. Methods of scientific knowledge

3. Classical and nonclassical paradigms of scientific rationality.

4. The nature of consciousness and unconsciousness.

The theory of knowledge and creativity is an important section of philosophy. It arose historically with philosophy, as its core, around which everything else was built. This department of philosophy considers a wide range of problems: the relationship between knowledge and reality, its sources and driving forces, its forms and levels, the principles and laws of cognitive activity, and the trends of its development. Philosophy analyses the criteria of the authenticity of knowledge, its veracity, and also the causes of error, the problems of the practical application of knowledge.

In the philosophy of the ancient world the basic problems of epistemology were developed by defining types, such as "knowledge" and "opinion", "truth" and "error". Opinion was opposed to knowledge as a subjective notion of the world, while knowledge was its objective investigation. Heraclitus saw the highest goal of cognition in "studying the universal", understanding what was hidden in the universe, the "logos", the universal law. Discussion of the problem of dividing knowledge into types proceeded from the relationship and opposition between ordinary consciousness and standards of theoretical thought, with its techniques of proof, disproof, and so on.

Agnosticism is a philosophical theory that denies the possibility of man's achieving authentic knowledge of the objective world. Some agnostics, while recognising the objective existence of the world, deny its knowability, others regard the very fact of the world's objective, existence as something unknowable. They maintain that knowledge is subjective by its very nature and that we are in principle unable to reach beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness and cannot know whether anything else except the phenomena of consciousness exists. From the standpoint of agnosticism the question of how a thing is reflected by us differs fundamentally from the question of how it exists in itself.

Most characteristic of the 20th century is the agnosticism of neopositivism, which tells us that philosophy cannot provide objective knowledge but must be confined to the analysis of language.

Another source of agnosticism is relativism, that is to say, the absolutising of the variability, the fluidity of things and consciousness. The relativists proceed from the pessimistic principle that everything in the world is transient, that scientific truth reflects our knowledge of objects only at a given moment; what was true yesterday is error today. Every new generation gives its own interpretation of the cultural heritage of the past. The process of cognition is foredoomed to a random pursuit of eternally elusive truth. Relativism works on the assumption that the content of knowledge is not determined by the object of cognition but is constantly transformed by the process of cognition, thus becoming subjective. Absolutising the relative in knowledge, the relativists regard the history of science as movement from one error to another. But if everything is relative, then this assertion, which can have meaning only in relation to the absolute, is also relative.

Knowledge is historically limited, but in every relative truth there is some objective content, which is intransient. The Intransient elements of past knowledge form a part of new knowledge. Scientific systems collapse but they do not disappear without a trace; more perfect theories are built on top of them. One of the forms in which relativism manifests itself is conventionalism, which maintains that the concepts of science are formally accepted postulates, and that the question of whether they correspond to reality may be discarded as irrelevant to science. The history of science is the history of omnipotent cognition, which renounces both the absolutising of achieved scientific truths and their sceptical denial.

Scepticism within reasonable limits is beneficial; but cheap scepticism is like blind fanaticism. They are both equally often encountered in narrow-minded people. Denial of the knowability of the world leads to pessimism about science and to repudiation of its values. And this opens the door to various forms of reaction against reason and science. When attempting to explain any phenomenon it is absurd to assume that it is inexplicable. A person must believe that the incomprehensible can be comprehended; otherwise there is no point in thinking about it.

The concept is a form of thought reflecting the essential properties, relations and connections of objects and phenomena in their contradictions and development; it is thought that generalises, grouping the objects of a certain class according to certain specific attributes that they have in common. Our concepts are objective in their content and universal in their logical form, inasmuch as they are related not to the individual but to the general.

The judgement is a form of thought in which something is asserted or denied about something by linking up certain concepts. For example, the sentence "the maple-tree is a plant" is a judgement in which an idea is expressed about the maple-tree, the idea that it is a plant. Knowledge does not lie in impressions but in judgements, because it is through them that we become aware of truth. As the solution of a certain problem a judgement is a cognitive act, but as a means of achieving the solution it is a logical operation. Logical operations are means of establishing the essential connections and relations between ideas that make thought move cognitively from ignorance to knowledge. Thought is impossible without judgements and judgements are impossible without definitions.

Analysis and synthesis. The process of cognition begins by our getting a general picture of the object without paying much attention to details, particulars. When we look at a thing in this way, its intrinsic structure and essence remain inaccessible to us. In order to study the essence we must break down the object into parts. Analysis is the breaking-down of objects into their component parts or aspects, and this is done by both practical and theoretical work. By analysis we also mean mental consideration of the specific nature of the components. The essence of an object cannot be understood merely by breaking it down into the elements of which it is composed and examining these elements as such. The chemist subjects meat to various operations and then says: "I have discovered that it consists of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and so on." But he knows as well as we do that these substances are no longer meat.

Abstraction is the mental identification, singling out of some object from its connections with other objects, the separation of some attribute of an object from its other attributes, of some relation between certain objects from the objects themselves. Abstraction is a method of mental simplification, by which we consider some one aspect of the process we are studying. The scientist looks at the colourful picture which any object presents in real life through a single-colour filter and this enables him to see that object in only one, fundamentally important aspect. The picture loses many of its shades but gains in clarity. Abstraction has its limit. One cannot abstract the flame from what is burning. The sharp edge of abstraction, like the edge of a razor can be used to whittle things down until nothing is left.

Idealisation as a specific form of abstraction is an important technique in scientific cognition. Abstract objects do not exist and cannot be made to exist in reality, but they have their prototypes in the real world. Pure mathematics operates with numbers, vectors and other mathematical objects that are the result of abstraction and idealisation. Geometry, for example, is concerned with exact circles, but physical object is never exactly circular; perfect roundness is an abstraction. It cannot be found in nature. But it is an image of the real: it was brought into existence by generalisation from experience.

Generalisation and limitation. In the process of generalisation we move from individual concepts to general concepts and from less general concepts to more general ones, from individual judgements to general ones, from statements of less generality to statements of greater generality, from less general theory to more general theory, in relation to which the less general theory becomes a particular case of the more general. We should not be able to cope with the abundance of impressions that surge over us every hour, every minute, every second, if we were not constantly uniting them, generalising them and registering them by means of language.

The mental transition from the more general to the less general is a process of limitation. Without generalisation there can be no theory. Theory, on the other hand, is created so that it can be applied in practice to solve certain specific problems. For example, when measuring objects or building certain technical structures, we must always proceed from the more general to the less general and the individual, there must always be a process of limitation. The grotesque fantastic images of mythology with its gods and monsters are closer to ordinary reality than the reality of the microworld conceived in the form of mathematical symbols. One can see that the turn towards the abstract is a very obvious trend of our time. Recourse to the abstract may also be observed in art, in abstract pictures and sculptures.

The abstract and the concrete. The concept of "the concrete" is used in two senses. First, in the sense of something directly given, a sensuously perceived and represented whole. In this sense the concrete is the starting point of cognition. But as soon as we treat it theoretically the concrete becomes a concept, a system of scientific definitions revealing the essential connections and relations of things and events, their unity in diversity. So the concrete appears to us first in the form of a sensuously observable image of the whole object not yet broken down and not understood in its law-governed connections and mediations, but at the level of theoretical thought it is still a whole, but internally differen tiated, understood in its various intrinsic contradictions. The sensuously concrete is a poor reflection of phenomena, but the concrete in thought is a richer, more essential cognition.

Analogy. In the literal sense this word means correspondence, that is to say, an objective relationship between objects that makes it possible to apply the information gained through investigating one object to another object that is similar in certain respects. Analogy, which links the threads of the unknown with the known, lies at the very heart of our understanding of facts. The new can be understood only through the images and concepts of the old, of what is known. The first aeroplanes were invented by analogy with the behaviour of other, objects in flight, such as birds or kites.

Modelling. A characteristic feature of modern scientific cognition is the enhanced role of the method of modelling, which is used with great effect in the technical, natural, and social sciences. Modelling is the practical or theoretical replacement of the object of research by some natural or artificial analogue whose investigation helps us to understand the essence of the original object. For example, by examining the properties of a model aeroplane we get a better understanding of the properties of the real thing. Modelling is based primarily on the principle of reflection, on similarity, analogy, on different objects having certain properties in common, and on the relative independence of form.

Formalisation. The advances of modern science have brought profound changes in the methods of scientific cognition. One of the most important is the method of formalisation—generalisation of the forms of processes that differ in content, abstraction of these forms from their content. Here the form is regarded as a relatively independent object of research. It is sometimes thought that formalisation is connected only with mathematics, with mathematical logic and cybernetics. This is incorrect. Formalisation permeates all kinds of practical and theoretical activity and differs only in degree or level. Historically it arose at the same time as language. Certain techniques of labour activity, certain skills emerged, were generalised, described and passed on from generation to generation in a form divorced from the concrete actions, objects and means of labour.

Historical and logical methods. From the two main aspects of objective process of cognition we draw two methods, the historical and logical. The logical method is used to express the general line, the pattern of development of an object, the development of society from one social formation to another, for example. The historical method is used to describe a concrete manifestation of a given pattern or law in all the infinite diversity of its specific and individual manifestations. In relation to society, for example, this is the real history of all countries and peoples with all their unique, individual destinies.

The logical is a generalised reflection of the historical: it reflects reality in its law-governed development and explains the necessity of this development. The logical is the historical, liberated from the principles of chronology, from its accidental and unique form. For example, when applied to the history of any science, the logical method of research presupposes a generalisation of the historical process, its stripping of all the transient, accidental turns or zigzags evoked by various, often external, relative factors, such as the zigzags of thought of a particular scholar, changes in historical circumstances, and so on. The logical method of research into the actual historical process is thus a matter of abstracting from the real historical process its intrinsic necessity and analysing that necessity in a logically "purified" form.

The empirical and the theoretical in thought. The motion of cognitive thought begins with the empirical, with the observation and establish ing of facts, their analysis and classification, and goes on from there to their generalisation, the making of hypotheses, the testing of these hypotheses and, finally, the construction of theories. Observation is an intentional, planned process of perception, carried out in order to identify the essential properties and relations in the object of cognition. Observation may be direct or indirect, mediated by various technical devices (molecules, for example, are now visually observed by means of electronic microscopes). Observation acquires scientific significance when it allows us on the basis of a research programme to present objects with maximum precision and may be repeated several times in conditions that we deliberately vary. The important thing is to select the most representative group of facts. Hence the importance of the researcher's intention, the system of methods he adopts and his interpretation of results and their control.

Experiment and its results are something that we obtain through our senses. Thought judges the nature of the object through experiment. In itself an experiment only establishes certain facts. Thought penetrates into their essence. What the scientist sees through his microscope or observes through a telescope or a spectroscope demands a certain amount of interpretation.

A fact is a phenomenon of the material or intellectual world which has become an authenticated part of our knowledge. It is the registering of certain phenomena, certain properties and relations. Science begins and ends with facts, regardless of what theoretical constructs are made in between. The statement that an object exists is the first but very limited stage in cognition.

A scientific fact is the result of reliable observation and experiment. It appears in the form of direct observation of objects, the readings of apparatus, photographs, descriptions of experiments, tables, diagrams, notes, archive documents, authenticated evidence of witnesses, and so on. But in themselves the facts are not yet science, just as building material is not yet a building. Facts are woven into the fabric of science only when they are selected, classified, generalised and explained, at least hypothetically.

Hypothesis. Science begins when we enter the realm of the unknown and start making suppositions, conjectures, and hypotheses. It is always much easier to make suppositions than to prove them. The conjecture is a supposition that has not yet been proved but sets out to explain certain facts. Its becoming a hypothesis involves the finding of arguments, the conversion of a miracle into something knowable. The hypothesis is a supposition based on facts, a starting-point for investigation of a part of reality that has not been sufficiently studied. It is a kind of probe with which the scientist takes his first soundings in the world of the unknown, or, to use another image, the scaffolding which is erected and then taken down when the building is finished.

Theory is an internally differentiated, developing system of objectively true, practically tested scientific knowledge that explains a law concerning phenome na in a certain field. Unlike the hypothesis, the theory provides reliable knowledge (including reliable knowledge of the probability of certain events). For example, the idea of the atomic structure of matter remained for a long time only a hypothesis. A theory is changed by incorporating in it new facts, ideas and principles. When a contradiction is discovered in a certain theory, a contradiction that cannot be resolved in the framework of its initial principles, the resolving of this contradiction leads to a new theory.

Truth, error and faith. Any idea, no matter how far-fetched, contains some objective content. Then are mermaids, witches and devils images of truth? The metaphysically-minded materialists, who interpret reflection one-sidedly, deny that there is any reflection of reality in error. Religious conscious ness, for example, is regarded as completely void of any objective content. But the history of humanity's search for knowledge shows that error does reflect, admittedly one sidedly, objective reality, that it has its source in reality, has an "earthly" foundation.

Error is an idea or a combination of ideas and images that arise in the mind of the individual or society and do not correspond to reality but are regarded as true. This definition of error follows logically from that of cognition as the reflection of reality.

Error should be distinguished from the mistake that is the result of incorrect practical or mental activiity, evoked by purely accidental, personal causes. It is commonly believed that errors are annoying accidents. But they have relentlessly pursued knowledge throughout history; they are a kind of penalty that humanity has to pay for its daring attempts to know more than is permitted by the level of practice and the scope of theoretical thought.

The concept of truth is linked with the moral concepts of honesty and sincerity. Truth is the aim of science and honesty is the ideal of moral motivation. Fruitful studies in science and philosophy are impossible where fear of the consequences of thinking is stronger than the love of truth. Truth is authenticated knowledge and knowledge is strength, the greatest strength of all. It cannot be destroyed by prisons, penal servitude, the gallows, the guillotine, or the stake.

Any truth is objective. There is no such thing as unobjective truth. Subjective truth is merely an individual's opinion. So the definition that we have given of truth is at the same time a definition of objective truth. Truth is not reality itself but the objective content of the results of cognition. Its content does not depend on the will, desire, passion or imagination of human beings.

The absolute in truth. In reality the process of cognition is carried on by succeeding generations, who think very restrictedly and only in terms of the given level of development of their culture. Absolute knowledge is therefore only an aim for which science strives and to which the road is endless. Complete knowledge does not exist; we can only approach it, as we do to the speed of light. The development of science is a series of consecutive approximations to absolute truth, of which each is more precise than its predecessor.

The term "absolute" is also used of any relative truth in the sense that if it is objective it must contain something absolute as one of its elements. Absolute truth is a piece of knowledge that is not refuted by the subsequent development of science but enriched and constantly reaffirmed by life. Humanity seeks full knowledge of the world. And although it will never attain such knowledge, it is constantly approach ing it and every step in that direction, although relative, contains something absolute. Taken as a whole, our knowledge of nature and the history of society is not complete, but it contains many grains of the absolute. The development of any truth is an accumulation of moments of the absolute.

The concreteness of truth. One of the basic principles of the dialectical approach to knowledge is recognition of the concreteness of truth. Recognition of this principle means approaching truth not abstractly but in connection with real conditions. The concreteness of truth means that we must pinpoint the decisive concrete historical conditions in which the object of cognition exists and identify the essential properties, relations and basic tendencies of its development. Concreteness is the real connection and interaction of all aspects of the object, knowledge of it in all the wealth of its interactions.

The criteria of truth. Only that which could be clearly apprehended and gave rise to no doubts could be considered true. Descartes' examples of such truths were mathematical statements such as "a square has four sides". Such truths have a distinctness that rules out all doubts. They are the result of the "natural light of reason". Just as light reveals both itself and the surrounding darkness, so is truth the measure of itself and of falsity.

The unity of cognition and practice. The basic form in which human life manifests itself is activity-sensuously objective, practical, and intellectual, theoretical. Man is an active being, not a passive observer at the "feast" of life. He influences things around him, gives them the shapes and properties necessary to satisfy historically evolved social and personal needs. The human being does not merely inhabit nature, he also changes it. Narrow practicism may be harmful to science, particularly its fundamental theoretical departments. It restricts scientific thought, confining it to the limits of the object of research, which are important only for historically transient forms of practice, and thus scales down the range and content of research activity. Conversely, when scientific thought is not fettered by such limits, it is capable of discovering in an object properties and relations that in perspective offer the opportunity of its far more diversified practical use.

Definition of consciousness. Human beings possess the most wonderful of all gifts-reason with its keen insight into the remote past and the future, its penetration into the sphere of the unknown, its world of dreams and fantasy, creative solutions to practical and theoretical problems and the realisation of the most daring plans. As the highest level of human mental activity, consciousness is one of the basic concepts of philosophy, psychology and sociology. The unique nature of this activity lies in the fact that the reflection of reality, and its constructive-creative transformation in the form of sensuous and mental images, concepts and ideas, anticipate practical action by individuals and social groups and give them a goal, an orientation.

Human consciousness is a form of mental activity, the highest form. By mental activity we mean all mental processes, conscious and unconscious, all mental states and qualities of the individual. These are mainly processes of cognition, internal states of the organism, and such attributes of personality as character, temperament, and so on. Mental activity is an attribute of the whole animal world. Consciousness, on the other hand, as the highest form of mental activity, is inherent only in human beings, and even then not at all times or at all levels. It does not exist in the newborn child, in certain categories of the mentally ill, in people who are asleep or in a coma. And even in the developed, healthy and waking individual not all mental activity forms a part of his consciousness; a great portion of it proceeds outside the bounds of consciousness and belongs to the unconscious phenomena of the mind.

Conscious and unconscious phenomena of the mind. The colourful fabric of mental processes is woven out of various "threads", ranging from the supreme clarity of consciousness at moments of creative inspiration, through the dimness of the half-sleeping mind, to the complete darkness of the unconscious, which accounts for a large part of man's mental life. For example, we hardly realise all the consequences of our actions. Not all external impressions are focussed by our consciousness. Many of our actions are automatic or habitual. However, despite the exceptional significance and place of unconscious forms of mental activity, the human being is primarily a conscious being.

Consciousness has a complex relationship with various forms of unconscious mental phenomena. They have their own structure, whose elements are connected with each other and also with consciousness and actions, which influence them and in their turn experience their influence on them selves. We are sensibly aware of everything that influences us, but by no means all sensations are a fact of our consciousness. At the scientific level scientists have for many years now been investigating the behaviour and mental activity of animals, particularly, such higher species as dolphins and apes, which possess amazing ability to imitate and observe. At a recent international conference which discussed the problem of consciousness in animals, most of the delegates said no in reply to the question, "Do animals think?" But the resolution passed by the conference after much argument contained a rather careful formulation: science has not enough facts to affirm with certainty or to deny the ability of animals to think.

Self-consciousness. A human being is aware of the world and his attitude towards it and is thus aware of himself. At this level, the objective and subjective begin to reveal their integral unity. This duality in unity is in fact the "glimmering dawn of self-consciousness". Self-consciousness was the answer to the imperative demand of social conditions of existence, which from the outset required that a person should be able to assess his actions, words, thoughts and feelings from the standpoint of certain social norms and to comprehend not only the surrounding world but also himself.

In the philosophical sense a self-conscious person is one who is fully aware of his place in life, the inevitability of passing through certain growth stages, the finity of his existence as a passing moment in the flow of events. The personality cannot be deprived of its reflexive dimension. This is one of the essential privileges that distinguish man from the animals.

The unity of language and consciousness.  Speech is language functioning in a specific situation of communication. It is the activity of communication and its recorded results. Language, on the other hand, is a specific vocabulary and grammar, expressed in rules and sentence patterns, which have been evolved historically and are national in character. But specific sentences, both spoken and written, belong not to language but to speech: they form the symbolic reality that constitutes the existence of language.

The aim of verbal communication is not only understanding and agreement but also the desire to suggest something to somebody else, to convince, to teach, to influence that person and guide his actions. There exist between people so-called volitional relations, which are expressed in the form of orders, instructions, prohibitions, permissions, obedience, disobedience, and so on. Influence on consciousness by means of speech takes place not only in the narrow framework of bilateral communication; it is also exercised on the scale of the social group and of whole countries and humanity in general.

Required reading:

1. Pritchard, Duncan. 2005. Epistemic Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Bayne, T. 2010. The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3. Bayne, T. and Montague, M. (eds.) 2012. Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. Gennaro, R. 2012. The Consciousness Paradox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5. Koch, C. 2012. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

6. Kriegel, U. 2009. Subjective Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

7. Prinz, J. 2012. The Conscious Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Seigel, S. 2010. The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Optional reading:

1. BonJour, Laurence. 2005. “In Defense of the A Priori”. In Steup and Sosa (eds.) 2005, pp. 98–105.

2. Brewer, Bill. 2005. “Perceptual Experience Has Perceptual Content.” In: Steup and Sosa 2005, pp. 217–230.

3. Hawthorne, John. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4. Huemer, Michael. 2000. Skepticism and the Veil of Perception. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

5. Levine, J. 2001. Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Conscious Experience. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

6. Llinas, R. 2001. I of the vortex: from neurons to self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

7. Metzinger, T. ed. 2000. Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lecture 14. Society and of human being as objects of philosophical analysis

1. Historical and axiological aspects of social life

2. The specifics of the philosophical view of man: the basic aspects of human nature.

3. The interpretation of the essence of man in the twentieth century philosophy.

An ancient maxim tells us that the proper study of man is man. The problem of man is an eternal and at the same time the most urgent of all problems. It lies at the heart of the philosophical questions of man's place and destination in a world that is being discovered and transformed in the name of humanity, the highest of all values. The main goal of social development is the formation of human abilities and the creation of the most favourable conditions for human self-expression.

Idealism reduces the human essence to the spiritual principle. According to Hegel, the individual realises not subjective, but objective aims; he is a part of the unity not only of the human race but of the whole universe because the essence of both the universe and man is the spirit.

The essence of man comprises both the spiritual sphere, the sphere of the mind, and his bodily organisation, but it is not confined to this. Man becomes aware of himself as a part of the social whole. Not for nothing do we say that a person is alive as long as he is living for others. Human beings act in the forms determined by the whole preceding development of history. The forms of human activity are objectively embodied in all material culture, in the implements of labour, in language, concepts, in systems of social norms. A human being is a biosocial being and represents the highest level of development of all living organisms on earth, the subject of labour, of the social forms of life, communication and consciousness.

Whereas the concept "human being" emphasises man's biosocial, body-mind origin, the concept "personality" is connected mainly with his social and psychological aspects, such as his sense of dignity, his self-appraisal, his value orientations, beliefs, the principles by which he lives, his moral, aesthetic, socio-political and other social positions, his convictions and ideals, and also the character, the special features of his intellect, the style and independence of his thinking, the specific nature of his emotional make-up, his willpower, cast of mind and feelings, his social status.

A personality is a socially developed person, one who is part of a certain specific historical and natural context, one or another social group, a person possessing a relatively stable system of socially significant personal features and performing corresponding social roles. The personality's intellectual framework is formed by his requirements, interests, frame of reference, and peculiarities of temperament, emotion, willpower, motivation, value orientations, and independence of thought, consciousness and self-consciousness. The central feature of the personality is world outlook. A person cannot become a personality without evolving what is known as a world outlook or Worldview, which includes his philosophical view of the world.

Personality in general is an abstraction, which is concretised in real individuals, in separate, single rational beings with all the inimitable proper ties of their mentality and physique, the colour of their skin, hair, eyes, and so on. The personality is a unique representative of the human race, always particular and unlike any other personality in the fullness of his spiritual and material, physical life: every "ego" is unique.

The term "Ego" or "Self" also denotes the personality as seen in the light of its own self-consciousness, i.e., a personality as perceived by itself, as it is known and felt by the Self. The "Ego" is the regulative principle of mental life, the self-controlling force of the spirit; it is everything that we are essentially both for the world and for other people and, above all, for ourselves in our self-consciousness, self-appraisal and self-knowledge. The "Ego" presupposes know ledge of and a relationship to objective reality and a constant awareness of oneself in that reality. Sensuous and conceptual images, states and goals are all part of the Ego, but they are not the Ego itself. The Ego rises above all the elements that compose the spirit and commands them, regulates their life.

The unity of man and society. A person's whole intellectual make-up bears the clear imprint of the life of society as a whole. All his practical activities are individual expressions of the historically formed social practice of humanity. The implements that he uses have in their form a function evolved by a society which predetermines the ways of using them. When tackling any job, we all have to take into account what has already been achieved before us. The wealth and complexity of the individual's social content are conditioned by the diversity of his links with the social whole, the degree to which the various spheres of the life of society have been assimilated and refracted in his consciousness and activity.

The idea of destiny and necessity. At first destiny was regarded not as a universal abstract necessity but as the fate of individual mortals. Everyone had his own particular fate. Necessity was thus broken down into a large number of fatal forces, sometimes embodied in various creatures such as the oracle, the sorceress, the magician, and so on.

Fatalism has a crushing effect on the individual. In human nature he sees a repulsive sameness, in human relations an irresistible force that belongs to everything in general and to no one in particular. The individual is merely driftwood on the waves. It is ridiculous to fight against the relentless law of fate. At best one may discover what it is, but even then one can only obey. Destiny leads the person who follows voluntarily, and those who resist are dragged by force. Freedom, according to the fatalist, is no more than the will of the horse, whose harness allows it to move only in one direction and in the framework of the shafts. Fatalism links up with religion, which asserts divine predestination. Both fatalism and religion grant human beings only a predestined role along with the illusion that they are acting independently. In any event the fatalist sees only a manifestation of necessity. Absolute surrender is what is expected of every individual in the face of imminent death.

The problem of freedom. Stressing the complexity of the problem of freedom, Hegel wrote: "Of no idea can it be stated with such complete justification that it is vague, ambiguous, and capable of generating the greatest misunderstanding, and therefore liable to be misunderstood, as the idea of freedom, and no idea is discussed with so little understand ing of its nature."

Freedom is the key philosophical problem, the crown of all the efforts of theoretical thinking, the culminating moment of any mature philosophical system. Idealism, which maintains the positions of indeterminism, regards the will as an immanent, autonomous, self-contained spiritual force, supposedly generating certain actions from its depths. For example, the existential notion of absolute freedom has no objective roots. According to Nietzsche, "the will to power" has more need of lucky errors than the truth for which we strive. Why, he asks, is falsehood, the unknown, even ignorance not better than truth? Jaspers's statement that not truth but ignorance is the guarantee of freedom strikes us as a meaningless paradox. According to Jaspers, the freest people of all are the insane, because they have no logic.

Existentialism interprets the human being as a force standing in opposition to the world and hostile to it. Its system of philosophy thus transforms will into what is, essentially, mere self-will. This is an apology not for freedom but for arbitrariness. There is a counterblast to this notion in Feuerbach, who believed that freedom was not the right of any man to be a fool in his own way. If we think that freedom is something absolute, independent of all objective necessity, we resemble the imaginary pigeon who believed that it would have flown much faster had it not been for the resistance of the air. It forgot one "little" thing: without air it could not live, let alone fly.

Responsibility. Human behaviour is regulated by many factors, including moral standards, the sense of shame, of conscience, of duty, and so on. The basic manifestations of the ethical life are the sense of social and personal responsibility and the awareness of guilt that this implies. Responsibility is not only a moral category, but also a psychological, legal and socio-political one.

Great controversy has raged around this problem for centuries. The idealists believe the sources of responsibility to be in the immanent principles of the human personality, even in the depths of its psychophysiology. For example, according to one conception of psychoanalysis, an individual is essentially helpless in the face of the forces that influence him from within. The responsibility placed upon him by society is merely an illusion. According to this conception, a person has got to realise that he is not the master of his own fate. Officially he is conscious. But although he himself is not aware of the forces that are at work within him, his choice is determined for him - his conscious will is only an instrument, a slave in the hands of the deep subconscious urge which determines his action.

Human freedom is manifest not only in the choice of a line of conduct, not only in control over the forces of nature and conscious reform of social relations. It is vividly expressed also in the individual's power over himself, over his instincts, inclinations and feelings. He is responsible both to society and his own conscience, for the forms in which these are expressed. Man becomes more perfect when he learns, under the influence of education, of moral, social and state demands, to consistently restrain impulses that are forbidden by social standards. And conversely we see that the person who has lost the power of self-restraint speaks and acts in a way in which he would not allow himself to do in an ordinary frame of mind and which he bitterly regrets when he returns to normal.

Required reading:

1. Cohen, Jean, 2012. Globalization and Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Evans, G., 2008. The Responsibility to Protect, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

3. Finnis, J., 2011. Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. Huxley, A. (1932 [2005]). Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

5. Kateb, G., 2011. Human Dignity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

6. Kennedy, D. 2004. The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

7. Talbott, W., 2005. Which Rights Should be Universal?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Teson, F., 2005. Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, Ardsley, NY: Transnational.

9. Wellman, C., 2010. The Moral Dimensions of Human Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Optional reading:

1. Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue, New York: Oxford.

2. Diener, E., R. E. Lucas, U. Schimmack and J. F. Helliwell (2009). Well-Being for Public Policy, New York: Oxford University Press.

3. Doris, J. M. (2009). “Skepticism about persons,” Philosophical Issues, 19(1): 57–91.

4. Hurka, T. (2010). The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters, New York: Oxford University Press.

5. Schwitzgebel, E. (2008). “The Unreliability of Naive Introspection,” Philosophical Review, 117(2): 245–273.

6. Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

7. Tiberius, V. (2008). The Reflective Life, New York: Oxford University Press.

8. Trout, J. D. (2009). The empathy gap: Building bridges to the good life and the good society, New York: Viking Press.

Lecture 15. Culture and civilization: the value foundations of being

1. The concepts of "culture" and "civilization": the nature and content.

2. The theories of values: the evolution and hierarchy of values.

3. Value and evaluation: the truth and the norm.

There is no universal definition of culture. Various functional descriptions of the cultural sphere, formulated to suit the goals of research, are possible but there is no integral definition of culture that would express its essence and be generally recognized, although the semantic extent of this concept is believed to be intuitively clear. The concept of culture (fr. L. cultura "tilling") is basically connected with something that is done well not only what is done but also how and what for. Doing is a mode of mastering the world. Culture is a kind of magic crystal that focuses all being. It is the creative principle of the life of the individual and of society as a whole; it is not just an ability taken to the point of art but a morally sanctioned goal.

What is the essence of present-day philosophical reflexion on the fate of culture? Our discussion of these problems will be limited to those aspects which will permit us, first, to correlate culture with other phenomena of life, and second, to outline the controversy concerning the prospects of mankind's cultural evolution, its direction, drawbacks and crossroads, its hopes and fulfilment.

The world of values. How can the concept of value be philosophically defined? Value is a fact of culture, and it is social in its very essence. Further, it is a functional and a necessarily objective-subjective phenomenon. Things and events as such, outside their relation to man and the life of society, do not exist in terms of value categories. This applies not only to humanize nature, i.e. to the entire area of civilization, but even to celestial bodies.

The concept of value is correlative with such concepts as significance, usefulness, and harmfulness. Significance characterizes the degree of intensity or tenseness of a given axiological relation: some things move us more than others, and some leave completely indifferent. Usefulness may be purely utilitarian. Material and non-material values clothes, dwellings, tools, skills, abilities, etc. can all have usefulness. Harmfulness is a negative axiological relation. We speak of truth as a cognitive value which is highly useful to human beings yet can also do them harm. Truth is not always rewarded people have been burnt at the stake or sentenced to hard labour for speaking the truth.

Culture and nature. The problem in the relationship between the natural and the cultural is that no clear-cut boundary can be drawn between them: culture is man's essential property, and man has not only a cultural but also a natural dimension. The cultural and the natural merge in a single whole in man, and the relations between them are so complex that they are not fully understood even now. What is stronger in man, the cultural or the natural element? Are cultural influences positive or negative? At different periods in history, different answers to these questions were offered.

The culture-man-nature triad is constantly present in philosophical works. It would be frivolous and naive to expect an unambiguous solution of the question, but the history of the development of this problem range permits the identification of certain obviously erroneous tendencies. When culture and human nature are absolutely opposed to each other, complacent, utopian, and essentially dangerous political tendencies often emerge; when culture and human nature are identified with each other, culture loses all independence and becomes a mere attribute of nature. Man is here simplistically perceived either as a purely cultural or purely natural phenomenon; he now controls the cultural process consciously and rationally, now becomes its unconscious and passive object, the plaything of anonymous symbolic structures of a given type of culture.

Culture and civilization. As distinct from the 18th and 19th centuries, when culture and civilization were mostly regarded as synonymous, characteristic of 20th-century philosophy of culture is gradual separation of these two concepts, of which the former continues to symbolize all the positive elements in this previously indivisible area while the latter is mostly used with neutral or downright negative overtones.

Civilization as material culture and mastery over the forces of nature undoubtedly carries a powerful charge of technological progress and promotes material affluence. The beneficial effect of the spreading of technological inventions is too obvious to need proof. At the same time technology and material affluence do not in themselves signify cultural and spiritual efflorescence; they cannot be regarded as absolutely moral or absolutely immoral: they are, in fact, neutral. The cultural value of technological achievements depends on the axiological context in which they are used, and this context may include, say, irrigation of formerly barren areas but also development of advanced weapons of mass destruction.

The attitude of some Western philosophers to civilization is flatly negative. The view of civilization as the "agony of culture" was formulated by O. Spengler, and it has only grown stronger since his time. The negative qualities usually ascribed to civilization are a tendency towards standardization of thinking, an inclination to treat generally accepted truths as absolutely correct, and a tendency to play down the independence and originality of individual thinking, which are seen as socially dangerous. From this standpoint, culture moulds the perfect personality, while civilization, the ideal law-abiding member of society content with the benefits offered him.

In order to better understand the entire complexity of the phenomenon of culture and its interconnections with material civilization, let us turn to yet another dilemma the problem of correlation between culture and consciousness.

Culture and consciousness. Can all cultural phenomena be reduced to the rational level of human consciousness? With all due respect for the achievements of reason, the answer to this question can only be negative: culture is a manifestation of man's properties in all their fullness. Can our emotional experiences in connection with some work of art, or our moral reaction to some event, be fully conveyed in the rational form of a scientific statement? Is the culture of emotions subject to the dictates of reason? The reverse is true: where reason usurps autocratic rights, culture degenerates into an ornamental pattern on the groundwork of life, instead of being its hidden essence.

The greatest value of cultural phenomena lies not so much in the community of their inner structure as in the unique content of these structures in each variety of culture. Here we have come to the central problem of the philosophy of culture, cultural typology.

The problem of the typology of cultures. How is the question of the correlation between Western and Eastern cultures solved now? If 19th-century culturology considered their systems of terms and symbols as basically closed, in the 20th century emphasis was laid on the culturological affinity of these traditions earlier perceived as disjoint. An indication of the tendency towards a synthesis between Western and Eastern cultures is the crossing of the two branches and the resultant new cultural varieties (of this nature is, e.g., the culture of Japan today or the cultural pluralism of numerous Buddhist communities in Europe and America).

The differences between European and Oriental cultures go back to remote antiquity. Of all the antithetic features distinguishing them that have been pointed out by culturologists, let us stress such basic elements as the attitude, first, to the human personality, second, to the possibilities of reason, and third, to socio-political activity. As distinct from Christian Europe, which deified the absolute personality of the Creator, and thus of man as the Creator's likeness, oriental religions are mostly based on the idea of falsity of the individual forms of spiritual life. The East cultivated the idea of rejection of the personal self in favour of the impersonal absolute. There is also a difference in the attitude to the possibilities of reason.

Any discussion of the phenomenon of culture calls for an analysis of the related concept of civilisation. Neither can be understood outside their contradictory unity.

The concept of civilisation.  Historically the idea of civilisation was formulated during the period of the rise of capitalism in order to substantiate the principle of historical progress, the necessity for the replacement of the feudal system, when the claim that it was God-given no longer satisfied social and philosophical thought. Instead it was maintained that history was motivated by man's vital interests, his desire to realise the principles of social justice and legal equality. Thinkers became concerned with the future of world civilisation as a whole and this prompted them to create a different paradigm of philosophical thought.

On the other hand, the sharpening of social contradictions in capitalist society led some philosophers to believe that the "sun" of social progress was about to set. This idea was most fully expressed in Oswald Spengler's well-known book The Decline of the West, which stimulated such thinkers as Pitirim Sorokin and Arnold Toynbee to produce their own socio philosophical patterns of the global historical process. Sorokin attempted to reduce recurrence in the historical process to recurrence in the spiritual sphere by generalising the corresponding spiritual phenomena into a concept of "types of culture" (culture being treated as synonymous with civilisa tion), while treating the historical process as their fluctuation. According to Sorokin, the sensate society that we know today is moving towards inevitable collapse and this is connected with the successes of science and materialism. He sees the salvation of humanity in the victory of the religious and altruistic principles, which should be active and creative. According to Arnold Toynbee, there is no single unified history of humankind. We are concerned with a score or so of unique and self-contained civilisations, and all of them are equally valuable in their own peculiar way. In its development every civilisation passes through the stages of emergence, growth, breakdown and disintegration, after which it is replaced by another. At present, according to Toynbee, only five main civilisations have survived: the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic, the Russian, and the Western. Civilisation's driving force is the "creative minority", which leads the "passive majority". In the stage of disintegration the minority imposes its will on the majority not by authority but by force.

The philosophy of culture. Civilisation depends on culture for its development and existence and, in its turn, provides the conditions for the existence and development of culture. Historically culture precedes civilisation. Usually culture is understood as the accumulation of material and spiritual values. This is a broad and largely correct interpretation but it leaves out one main fact, and that is the human being as the maker of culture. Culture is quite often identified with works of art, with enlightenment in general. This definition is too narrow.

This contradiction between culture and civilisation may also be found in the individual, the self. The adjective "cultured" presupposes something more than the acquisition of the ability to solve complex intellectual problems or to behave properly in society. Culture in the true sense presumes the observation of all the formal elements of socially accepted standards not as something external but as an integral part of the personality, of consciousness and even subconsciousness, of its habits. These standards then acquire a true and lofty spirituality, which is something more than obedience to certain rules. The culture of both the individual and society has various degrees of sophistication.

The contradictory nature of culture finds expression also in the fact that every culture has progressive, democratic and antidemocratic, reactionary, regressive tendencies and elements. The expression "mass culture" is today extremely popular in the West. It is mostly used with a tinge of scorn, meaning something "watered down for the majority". What is imposed or implanted under the guise of "mass culture" in the western countries has a political and ideological implication-the reinforcement of the power of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.

The term "mass culture" becomes negative when the masses are not raised to the level of real culture, when "culture" itself is refabricated to suit the primitive tastes of the backward sections of the population and itself declines, degenerates to a level so low as to be an affront to all real cultivation of the senses. The mass of the people with its great fund of folk wisdom is presented with stupidity in the guise of culture and the sacred majesty of true culture's historical mission is insulted in the process.

Man in the system of culture. Culture is the living process of the functioning of values in the context of the existence of the individual and society. It is the process of their creation, reproduction and use in historically changing ways. Culture arose and is developing together with society, creating an enormous tradition. The history of culture is full of stagnant phenomena, rigid dogmatic systems and conservatism, and also of revolutionary innovations. The previous achievements of culture are not parted from us. Their finest examples continue to live and "work". No child can become a developed personality without absorbing some of the treasures of culture. Culture always survives those who have created it and that which it originally served.

Modern civilisation has enormously expanded the opportunities not only of human knowledge, of physical, biochemical, physiological and intellectual forms of activity, but also the various ways of developing them. Here an important role has been played by such disciplines as psychology, neurobiology, and medicine, which have long made humanity their study. They are constantly perfecting their research techniques in order to penetrate the mechanisms of life.

Oriental culture is full of beliefs about the role of the way of life and its various components-breathing techniques, diet, self-training, cultivation of the skin, physical mobility, the ability to commune very subtly with nature, acupuncture, cauterising, and other ways of influencing the biologically active centres of the organism, herbomedicine, diagnostics by means of the iris of the eye, pulse and olfactory diagnostics, consideration of the position of the earth in relation to the celestial bodies in medicine, the time of year and day and of the properties of water in relation to the state of the earth strata and the character of its flow in connection with geomagnetic phenomena-all this and much else has contributed to the great wisdom of the Eastern peoples, the wealth of their culture and man's place therein, their understanding of the mechanisms of regulation of his life activity and vital potentials.

The gap between Western and Oriental cultures and the ignorance that exists on both sides often results in a representative of one culture becoming overenthusiastic about the other and forgetting his roots. For example, he may become dedicated to yoga or karate without taking into account the specific features of his own culture or the genetic and other natural factors of his psychosomatic structure. This may have a result that is directly opposite to what he desires. Resorting to the East in search of exotic variants of cultural values merely for the sake of the current fashion usually indicates a low level of culture. It is like a person chasing in the darkness of the unknown for something that he does not know.

The thinking mind of culture is philosophy. Philosophy is its focus and, without it, no real culture of the mind or heart, no true intellectual achievement is possible. Philosophy is a fact of culture, its nucleus, its self-consciousness; at the same time it is an examination of culture as the human factor, the highest of all values known to man.

Required reading:

1. Dancy, Jonathan, 2004. Ethics without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Darwall, Stephen, 2002. Welfare and Rational Care. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3. Kraut, Richard, 2007. What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

4. Rönnow-Rasmussen, Toni, 2009. Personal Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. Hurka, Tom, 2010. “Asymmetries in Value”. Nous, 44: 199–223.

Optional reading:

1. Bradley, Ben, 2006. “Two Concepts of Intrinsic Value”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 9: 111–130.

2. Brown, Campbell, 2007. “Two Kinds of Holism About Values”. Philosophical Quarterly, 57: 456–463.

3. Bykvist, Krister, 2009. “No Good Fit: Why the Fitting-Attitude Analysis of Value Fails”. Mind, 118: 1–30.

4. Dorsey, Dale, 2012. “Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle”. Philosophical Studies, 157: 267–285.

5. Langton, Rae, 2007. “Objective and Unconditioned Value”. Philosophical Review, 116: 157–185.

6. Olson, Jonas, 2009. “Fitting Attitudes Analyses of Value and the Partiality Challenge”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 12: 365–378.

7. Portmore, Douglas, 2007. “Consequentializing Moral Theories”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88: 39–73.

8. Rabinowicz, Wlodek, 2008. “Value Relations”. Theoria, 74: 18–49.

9. Suikkanen, Jussi, 2009. “Buck-Passing Accounts of Value”. Philosphy Compass, 4: 768–779.

Note

Texts online

1. Works by thinkers at Project Gutenberg

2. Works by or about thinkers at Internet Archive

Audio

Works by or about thinkers at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Video

Video reels, video texts on all philosophical issues at http://www.youtube.com

Seminar 1.

1. The philosophy as a unity of knowledge and wisdom.

2. The philosophy as a self-consciousness of culture.

3. Philosophy, science, art and morality.

Seminar 2.

1. Features of Eastern philosophy in the comprehension of the world and man.

2. The philosophy of the Upanishads.

3. The problem of man and the state in the philosophy of Confucianism.

4. Man and Space in the philosophy of Taoism.

Seminar 3.

1. Conceptual thinking: from natural philosophy to Parmenides.

2. Atomism of Democritus as the pinnacle of Greek natural philosophy.

3. From the philosophy of nature to human philosophy: sophistry, Socrates.

4. The world of ideas of Plato and the doctrine of Aristotle.

3. Hellenistic-Roman philosophy: cynicism, skepticism, stoicism and neo-platonism.

Seminar 4.

1. Scholasticism and its off-shoots: thomism and scotism. Scholastic method.

2. Main problems of medieval philosophy in the works of St. Augustine and Th. Aquinas.

3. Al-Ghazali and his refutation of the philosophers.

4. Sufism: the selfless experiencing and the actualization of the truth.

Seminar 5.

1. Undermining the monopoly of the church and emergence of the secular culture.

2. The mystical pantheism of Nicholas of Cusa.

3. Natural philosophy of G. Bruno and Copernican revolution.

4. Machiavellism and utopian thought.

Seminar 6.

1. The priority of epistemology and methodology in modern philosophy.

2. Scientific and rationalist paradigm and the "war of all against all".

3. Nature, society, people in the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

4. Voltaire: Common sense, religious tolerance, freedom of thought.

Seminar 7.

1. The antinomies of the human mind and the agnosticism of Kant.

2. The parallelism between the development of nature and the development of knowledge in philosophy of Schelling.

3. The problem of the alienation of the human essence in the philosophy of Feuerbach.

4. "Capital": goods as alienated result of alienated labor.

Seminar 8.

1. Voluntarism and pessimism of the philosophy of Schopenhauer

2. Irrationalism and existentialism of S. Kierkegaard.

3. Immoralism and individualistic character of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Seminar 9.

1. A. Camus’ man of absurdity as an expression of alienated consciousness.

2. Fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger.

3. E. Husserl: phenomenological reduction.

4. The emergence of hermeneutics: the attempt of overcoming of alienation.

5. The culmination of the exclusion and decline of civilization in postmodern philosophy.

Seminar 10.

1. Phenomenon akyn-zhyrau in Kazakh culture.

2. Sufi ideas in the works of Abai and authentic human existence in the philosophy Shakarim.

3. Existentialism of F. Dostoyevski, L. Shestov and N. Berdyaev.

4. Russian cosmism and Russian eurasianism.

Seminar 11.

1. The philosophical content of concepts "being", "non-being" and "nothing".

3. Classical and non-classical understanding of being.

4. Matter and its attributive properties: the problem of the finite and the infinite.

Seminar 12.

1. The problem of development in the history of philosophy.

2 . Determinism and indeterminism.

3. Dialectics and modern scientific thinking.

Seminar 13.

1. Science as a form of cultural production.

2. Positivistic ideal of science.Scientific traditions and scientific revolution.

3. Consciousness and reflection: language, speech and thinking.

4. Consciousness, preconscious, unconscious.

Seminar 14.

1. The theory of social progress: summative and substantial approaches.

2. Classical and non-classical interpretation of human being.

3. Contradictions of humanism, freedom, the meaning of life, fate and predestination of man.

Seminar 15.

1. Culture as "intermediate state" between barbarism and civilization.

2. The idea of enclosed cultural-historical types and the theory of enclosed local cultures.

4. Civilization and culture in the concept of “axial time”.

5. Universal and national values in the conditions of globalization.