The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab

The reader is offered a summary of the development of Peter Berger's sociocultural phenomenology. The author proceeds from the position that Berger's theoretical approach contributed to the humanization of everyday life, the actualization of the life world as a finite province of meaning. Peter Berger is a key figure in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion and the theory of modernization. Dealing with the most vital and acute social problems, he created an adequate categorical apparatus for the phenomenological description of society. He did not only critically review the sociological trends of Weber and Durkheim, Mead and Parsons, but also continued the sociocultural phenomenology that had been started by Ingarden and Schütz. The main achievements of P. Berger are as follows: he investigated the legitimizing relationship between institutions and social reality; presented social knowledge as a constructed reality; suggested a phenomenological language for describing everyday life; described a society as a unity of the subjective-objective process of formation; revealed the humanistic potential of phenomenology; analyzed the genealogy of social myths; revealed the essence and functions of the bureaucracy in social order; described the structure of the symbolic world of religion in a post-industrial society; reformed sociology giving it a value-semantic value, alternative to Marxism; continued Weber's studies of religion and capitalism; developed theories of secularization of religion in the pluralistic world; positioned the transcendent as a private sphere. Socio-cultural phenomenology of P. Berger is a method of contextual correlation of different social worlds – science and religion, worldly and transcendental, personal and collective.

The concept of biocapitalism was proposed to study specific forms of social dynamics arising from the perception of human biology in the logic of investment. The author shows that the phenomenon of biocapitalism advances due to the difference in social, biological, and other “local times” considered in the article from the viewpoint of the “time studies” program proposed by Helga Nowotny. Both social time and biological time can lose unity, breaking up into the duration of the disease, the epidemiologic cycles, the duration of pregnancy or maturation. On the other hand, one “local time” can serve as a point of unification, a mediator for the other two. In addition, our research perspective corresponds to the post-ELSI view on the role of philosophy. In this regard, the second approach is the constructive philosophy of technology, developed by Philip Brey (Netherlands) to achieve the objectives of responsible research and innovation. Through the use of these two approaches, we make an attempt of transdisciplinary examination of modern technological cases and some aspects of the genealogy of technology. “Local time” areas are constructed and connected along with development and distribution of new technologies – biotechnologies, as a rule. The author suggests naming this process the creation of a “temporal infrastructure” of biotechnologies. He proposes a preliminary model of such infrastructure, which ensures the development of biocapitalism: biotechnologies create local times for biological objects; the biotechnology market opens up the possibility of gluing these local times to social ones. Through the study of these processes, we can use the concept of biocapitalism not only for external criticism of the social consequences of new technologies, but also for a humanitarian expert’s participation in the value-sensitive design of their “temporal infrastructure”.

В дискуссиях вокруг теорий, объясняющих научный прогресс, натуральная философия позднесредневекового периода рассматривается как играющая роль апологетики. Для философов науки с их отказом от метафизики задача обеспечения рациональной реконструкции научного прогресса представляется почти невозможной. Даже объяснения, предложенные Поппером и Куном, испытывают большие трудности и дают лишь частично удовлетворительные результаты. В своей работе «Логика научного исследования» К. Поппер утверждает, что метафизика играет случайную роль в появлении новых научных идей. В свою очередь, в «Структуре научных революций», осуществляя теоретические интерпретации и классификацию эмпирических фактов без их метафизических предпосылок, Томас Кун приходит к выводу о том, что естествознание сформировалось под влиянием ошибочных интерпретаций аристотелевской натурфилософии средневековыми натурфилософами. Это является одной из причин того, что медиевистам до сих пор приходится защищать натурфилософию позднего Средневековья от поверхностных убеждений в том, что в средневековых университетах вообще не могло быть ничего, имеющее значение для современной науки и философии. Стремясь представить фрагмент последовательной реконструкции развития естественной философии, я рассматриваю одну из идей позднесредневековой философии – а именно, объяснение движения (импетус). Основной тезис данного исследования в том, что идеи позднесредневековой натурфилософии сыграли отнюдь не случайную либо отрицательную роль в развитии современного естествознания – напротив, они имеют здесь решающее значение. Следуя аристотелевскому философскому подходу, статья раскроет предпосылки теории импетуса Жана Буридана. Затем будут представлены дебаты по поводу объяснения движения снаряда, и, наконец, будет выявлено необходимое значение этой метафизической идеи о модификациях натурфилософии.

The article reflects on the book by Valery V. Savchuk “Blood and Culture”. Conceived in the late 1980s and first published in the mid-1990s, it receives a new – expanded and supplemented – edition on the eve of the 2020s. The key reason for reflecting on the book is to show the impossibility of reading it retrospectively. A new context – media reality – has become our lifeworld and formed a new text that lives in a mode of relevance, answers the questions of the topology of pain in the digital, the hermeneutics of the victim’s discourse on the network, the latent work of negative experience in communication, and new forms of violence in gadgets. While the first edition was an experience of self-reflection of culture and recognition of alienated forms, the second one is a guide to the new technological reality. Indeed, the more complex is the construction of our reality, the more fragility it can manifest and the more primitive energies it can release. For that reason, the key plot of the article relates to the mechanisms of taming this energy as work with the psychophysiological resource of a person in the world of high technologies.

The article highlights the concept of Homo Creator formulated basing on a fundamental analysis of the existing theories in the philosophy of technology. Poser criticizes the functional approach towards the essence of technology and suggests changing it into the neothomist understanding of technology as a choice of the most optimal solution among an initially given scope of possible solutions. By doing so, he demonstrates his adherence to Dessauer’s interpretation of technology. The model seriously evolves by engaging Hartmann’s ontology of the four stages of word understanding and by defining the place of technical artifact in it. He develops the relevant system of categories and redefines a relation of human-technical object. This scheme is linked to the downward causation suggested by Karl Popper and results in a model of user–constructor–inventor (in different roles). In this model, an inventor’s idea, which has emerged from some correlation between categories of possibility and need and is coming into existence in a draft drawing, puts frameworks on a material construction of the technical artifact by a constructor. Such an approach demonstrates a universal character of the technical artifact. Basing on Poser’s ontology, this article considers the possibility of using the notion of “non-Humboldtian trading zone” for describing and understanding a contemporary communication between software developers and users.

This article studies the major trends and problems in the ethics of external scientific communication (science communication), which currently possesses no specific and generally accepted code of ethical standards. This is partially due to the fact that the notion of ‘science communication’ refers to a quite interdisciplinary field of academic research, and also to a number of related professional practices. The first part of the article focuses on how the normative scientific ethos relates to science communication. The second part considers the problem of epistemic trust and some possible ways to solve it (epistemic division of labor vs. epistemic equality and equal respect). The third part studies the intricacies emerging from applying any ethical principle prescribed to science communication and demonstrates the presence of ambivalence (the concept of R. Merton) in the choice between the ethical imperatives. Furthermore, the author shows that the relevance of any principle for each case depends on the audience and the aims of communication. In describing and evaluating these issues, the author relies on the works by Robert Keohane and his colleagues, as well as by Stephen John.

This article is a response to the recent forty-third report to the Club of Rome prepared for its 50th anniversary. This report focuses not only on the analysis of contemporary global problems, but also on their source – a worldview crisis. Global risks and threats to the very existence of humanity, repeatedly noted in the previous reports, can be overcome only through a radical change in the worldview, which means a “new enlightenment.” The world has changed so much because of human activity that there is no longer room for extensive development. From here, this is a “complete world” – the world not of Newton but rather of Descartes, – in which any act has a profound impact on the environment. In contrast to it, the human mind has not changed, which is fraught with the most tragic disasters. It seems that the most convincing is the first part of the report that demonstrates the depth and global nature of the current crisis. The second part, which focuses on criticizing some vague conglomerate under the name of “modern philosophy” and on the declaration of a “new Enlightenment”, deserves criticism because of its syncretism and the desire to combine the incompatible. The last part of the report, which contains practical recommendations, is more difficult to assess, since they require practical testing. Yet, the proposed solutions in many cases look hardly feasible, or even quite utopian. Probably, the only function performed by the report in full, is to attract public attention to the difficult situation in which contemporary world exists.

This paper focuses on the characteristics of Proto-Megascience, a type of Megascience that emerged in the 1970s. Proto-Megascience originated in high-energy physics at a stage when, with still relatively moderate instrument scales, team sizes, costs and durations, experiments developed such features of advanced Megascience as the degeneration of experiments into chains with similar scientific programs, as well as the equality of epistemic and non-epistemic, in particular political, interests. The author discusses a case study of a series of joint Soviet-American accelerator experiments (Dubna-Fermilab) aimed at research into small-angle proton scattering using a supersonic gas target. Furthermore, he analyzes the mutual translation of epistemic and political interests, as well as the equality of living and non-living actors in a trading zone exemplified by a Proto-Megascience experiment.

The article represents a critical comment on the talk given by Vitaly Pronskikh at the Lobachevsky University of Nizhni Novgorod. His description and analysis of proto-megascience drawing on the historical case-study of Fermilab (USA) in the last third of the 20th century comes to some interesting conclusions. They require rethinking the picture of megascientific projects as a part of market economy and neoliberal ideology. Moreover, Pronskikh focuses on the structure of scientific communication, which reveals its key role in defining the peculiarity of the projects in question. The criticism of his position aims at specifying the communicative acts in the core of the international collaboration group. The collective epistemology, for instance, views scientific deliberation among specialists of high degree as aggregation that allows retaining one’s theoretical position without groupthink attitude. Moreover, the structure of collaboration normally integrates political interests and the conflict of expert statuses to that extent that they acquire the primarily significance and give the research interests merely the secondary role. Megascientific projects seem to transform into sociotechnical ensembles (Wiebe Bijker), where no strict boundary can be drawn between the technical, the scientific and the social.

The paper analyzes the impact of proto-megascience projects on constructing the collec- tive subject of knowledge. Based on the analysis of the functioning of Big science projects, the au- thor concludes that most projects involve the formation of communities of actively interacting researchers. However, we can hardly talk about the evolution of the collective subject of knowledge in scientific and technical projects re- lated to the issues of countries’ military capability or the development of commercial technologies The formation of the collective subject of knowledge seems rather possible regarding the implementation of fundamental research pro- jects, in which representatives of different coun- tries take part. The structure of such projects im- plies equality of scientists representing different countries. This creates favorable conditions for the formation of the collective subject of knowledge.

The paper vastly comments on Vitaly S. Pronskikh’s article “Proto-Megascience. The Transfer of Interests in the Trading Zones”. In analysing a particular project of the Megascience type, the author poses a question on the comparison of the gnoseological potential possessed by the collective collaboration and the single scientist. Along with it, he also suggests a solution for the problem of the equivalence in the intellectual and technological exchange between Megascience participants.

This paper is a short reply to the critics’ comments given on my article Proto-Megascience: Translating interests in a trading zone.

This is an introduction to the Russian translation of the first chapter from William Whewell’s “On the Principles of English University Education”. The author makes a short review of the situation in Cambridge university at the beginning of the XIX century. She pays special attention to the development of mathematics in Cambridge. The author reconstructs the key ideas about the university education and teaching provided by Whewell. She claims that Whewell’s philosophy of education makes a contribution to a proper understanding of the ways for modernization of Russian education. She argues that the “practical” way of teaching, which was defended by Whewell, could be implemented through integration of STS program in Russian universities.

The practice-oriented approach implies a shift in emphasis from objective knowledge to operational knowledge. The focus is on a transition from the description of ways to obtain knowledge to acquiring them, from established knowledge to knowledge of ignorance. The formation of operational knowledge involves the use of technologies that answer the navigational model in education. The article aims to enunciate the philosophical basis of the practice-oriented approach in education and substantiate its efficiency for the course on the History and Philosophy of Science in post-graduate studies, referring to the ideas of the Russian philosopher Nina I. Martishina. Philo- sophical reflection as a universal intellectual operation suggests analyzing the three levels of objective reality of science, depicted by the Russian philosopher Mikhail B. Sapunov. The results of the study. Philosophical knowledge, presented in the form of intellectual operations, becomes available for practical use, and the three levels of philosophical reflection on the objective reality of science substantiate the unity of the three aspects of the existence of science. Operational knowledge bases on using the navigation (or network model in education. Discussions and conclusions. The results of the study give the basis for suggesting the “navigational” model (Sergei A. Smirnov’s concept), or network model of education. The authors suggest two cases using a practice-oriented approach in the teaching of the History and Philosophy of Science.

The article deals with R.G. Collingwood’s “reform of metaphysics” in the context of the historical development of post-Kantian critical philosophy and science. The question raised by the author is what do such phenomena as a “return to pre-Kantian modes of thought” (A.N. Whitehead) or “ontological turn” in contemporary philosophy mean, provided that the historical development of thought is irreversible? It is shown that Kant’s Copernican revolution consisted in closing the question of external sources of knowledge. Collingwood continues the line of Kant’s critical philosophy, proposing a project of “metaphysics without ontology”, which must deal with the structure of our knowledge of the world, but not with the world as it is in itself. However, Collingwood is in a different historical situation, far removed from Kant. Applying the Kantian-inspired method of regressive (or genetic) epistemological justification of experience, Collingwood sets out to uncover “absolute presuppositions”, i.e. back- ground metaphysical assumptions about the world that make a historically new experience possible. The historical bankruptcy of Kant’s fundamental idea that there is only one universal way of organizing our experience, belonging to timeless transcendental subjectivity, brings the problem of justification of knowledge claims to the ontological level. The non-removability of ontology could be understood as a real alternative to Kant’s Copernican revolution. This is discussed through the reading of Collingwood, whose project of “metaphysics without ontology” reveals dependence on certain ontological premises which show the opposite – “ontology without metaphysics”.

This paper focuses on three concepts – commensurability, bicultural, and domestication, aiming to consider their epistemic significance in sociocultural anthropology. All classical non-relativistic anthropology rested on the idea of commensurability, while the incommensurability as a problem did not even exist there: “savage” and “civilized” cultures were assumed by default to be commensurable. For convenience, I will refer to such positivistic “commensurability by default”, which is before or outside relativistic and interpretive anthropology, as “commensurability-1”. However, there is another – the hermeneutic – understanding of commensurability, developing in the “post- relativistic era” of anthropology; I will call it “commensurability-2”. This is a more reflexive and critical form, which assumes that understanding comes not through an exact knowledge or translation of a representative of an alien culture, but rather as an intermittent process of a continuing “long talk” that changes the interlocutors. This “long conversation” can be investigated, for example, as a sequence of communicative situations. The question of commensurability in interpretive anthropology and interpretative sociology involves the study of epistemically obscure, “muddy” communication situations between representatives of different cultures. These are situations in which uncertainty, ambiguity, anomaly, illusions and errors in understanding are considered epistemically constructive, rather than negative, phenomena (from the positivist viewpoint). Such situations can be depicted through the concept of epistemic murk (Michael Taussig), that characterizes a state of anthropologists on the road to biculturalism, entering into the alien culture. Domestication, in all likelihood, can be considered as a mechanism for achieving biculturalism.

The article aims to describe the main problems that can become a substantive basis for the journal thematic section “The Discussion Questions of the Language of Science” actualizing in the context of the semiotic paradigm. The author has set and achieved two major objectives, which determined the general logical and semantic structure of the article. These objectives include reviewing the main Russian journals published on the language of science and the actualization of the problems of the ideal language into possibilities including the language of science through the semiotic model proposed by Charles Morris. The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the ideal sign-language system are used as grounds for differentiating the synchronic and diachronic problems of the language of science. As shown in the article, the main semiotic problems of the language into possibilities and the language in reality include questions related to the peculiarities of using the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules. For syntactics, such rules are the requirements concerning the procedure for constructing and transforming a language system. For semantics, these are rules for applying signs to designated objects. For pragmatics, these are rules of interpretation of signs. The overall positive assessment of Morris’ meta-language model as a normative language matrix bases on the absence of generally accepted and stable theories of language differing from the semiotic language doctrine. At the same time the modern semiotics does not limit the range of its cognitive interests to the level of speech discourses of the sign-language system, the standard of semantic correctness of which includes the language of science. Today the object of semiotics covers various types of language practices, which being implemented in the language are not limited to it. In this context, the article attempts to encourage interdisciplinary discussion platforms focusing on the actual debatable problems of the language to be created within such advanced forms of periodicals, as philosophically oriented e-journals.

The article discusses the methodological conception of the Scottish thinker William Whewell, created in the middle of the twentieth century. Whewell believed that man has some innate ideas, which imposing on sensory perceptions generate knowledge. Among the fundamental ideas that guide human knowledge, Whewell distinguishes the ideas of space, time and number. They are studied and developed by «pure» sciences. In other sciences, these fundamental ideas are complemented with the ideas of causality, environment, similarities, etc. In his methodological constructions, Whewell relied on a thorough study of the history of practically all the developed sciences of his time, therefore he anticipated a turn towards the history of the philosophy of science, which took place in the second half of the twentieth century. The conception of Whewell included of idea of a hypothetical-deductive structure of scientific knowledge, the idea of «theory-ladeness» of facts, and empirical verifiability as a most important criterion of scientific nature. It is a pity that the conception created by the founder of the philosophy of science was forgotten for a long time.

The article continues the philosophical discussion on the recent significant work by Vladimir Kutyrev. In his critical analysis of it, Vadim Rozin accepts the key points of V. Kutyrev’s book and scholarship, such as the concepts of “being”, “non-being”, “negative consequences of scientific and technological development”, “philosophical discourse”; still, the conclusions are denied. The understanding of “being” and “non-being” by V. Kutyrev comes in line with Parmenides’ onto- logical discovery and M. Heidegger’s criticism of metaphysics. The novelty of V. Kutyrev’s ideas relates to the situation in which contemporary scientific and technical changes maintains the possibility of post-human and beyond-human transformations along with a possible termination of human history. Parmenides’ abstract «being» is transforming into “otherness” of post-humanity and artificial intelligence superseding human be- ings. “Negative consequences of scientific and technical development” is a form of transition of technogenic civilization into a posthuman exist- ence. Hardly anybody is able to know the future – yet, the transition from human to posthuman seems to be getting more pronounced. Obviously, we have to reconsider all philosophy starting with Thales for its connection to human being or non- being. Classical rational strategies of philosophical discourse should be supplemented with non- classical ones. An essayistic and even artistic character of V. Kutyrev’s scholarship appears a worthy example of such reconsideration. To my mind, his recent book once again confirms his sta- tus as a leading philosopher in the field of under- standing and solving the crucial issue of modern humanity: to be or not to be?