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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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”.

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?

This article focuses on the changes happening in contemporary Masters Philosophy programs taken in a broader context of changes in academia on the whole. As an example the authors consider the history and evolution of the Masters program in philosophy at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod (Russia), focusing on the reasons for its creation, primarily related to the logic of the Humboldt model of higher education. They accentuate that its new concept has been suggested and introduced in context of the new general socio-economic and cultural challenges of the time, the accompanying new university models and the prevalence of institutional pragmatism. The authors investigate the problem of ways and instruments of organizing courses and teaching in Masters Philosophy programs that are more adequate to modern times, as well as possible careers of the graduates. The latter issue addresses us to some pragmatic ideas about possible transformations in academic philosophy, such as the ‘field philosophy’ (Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle) implying a more active engagement of philosophers into interactions with scientists, engineers, politicians, and other social groups. Along with it, we also consider philosophers’ participation in interdisciplinary research projects (Nancy Tuana) and social and humanitarian expertise.

The article proposes to discuss the concept of universal rationality. How is justified in contemporary philosophy the talk about universal rationality? Moreover, if so, on what grounds? What should be the theory of universal rationality and what theoretical and practical means does the philosopher have if she wants to remain dogmatic? In this paper I will try (1) to briefly describe the attitude of philosophy to the definition of rationality in a historical perspective; (2) list the fundamental theoretical problems associated with the attempts to define universal rationality; (3) derive the requirements that the concept of universal rationality must satisfy; (4) offer a theoretical basis for its construction; (5) and outline techniques for their implementation.

The article shows that the debatableness of the internalist regulative idea of the universal rationality leads to its understanding as a dogma, which can be a fiction or a polemical position, but without evidence based on extreme evidence or principles, which are problematic themselves, any claim to the universality of rationality is destroyed even without the use of relativized externalistic arguments. Unobvious per se universal rationality has to justify itself, which leads to the regressive argument, the axiomatic argument, and the circular argument. Regression is infinite, and therefore unfeasible, whereas the circular and axiomatic arguments are based on the unconditional beginning, which is obvious in itself, whether it is an obvious object, a logical connection, or their identity. The problem of the beginning makes a cognizant person questionable. It also reveals the questions of imitation, self-deception, disclosure, and self-disclosure, ideology, the status of the author, and the subjectivity of thought. The latter issue is, in its extreme form, existential. However, the practical significance of the problem remains – the need for a platform for understanding. Yet, even in the process of understanding the supposed universal rationality acts as one of the sides of this process, which can be understood as a conflict, that is, does not fulfill its role of the basis or the universal mediator at least.

The issue of either universal or “regional” nature of rationality can potentially be given some new insights through the example of urban studies. Is city a rational structure? Does it have only one or multiple strategies of rationality? This paper attempts to give a possible answer to the scope of these complex epistemological questions. Alternative sources of rational city behavior are presented in a number of groups of interest: city residents and urban movements, local government, business, etc. All of them have certain goals and ways of their achievement. Although they differ, we cannot doubt their rational nature. At the same time, the conflicting manner of city interactions makes coming to terms with each other a tall order. Urban planning as a movement and an institutional mediator of structural and organizational city changes is constantly in the process of paradigmatic changes: starting from utopian projects, through rational comprehensive planning to communicative planning and, finally, to a technocratic “operational system” city. All these transitions encourage us to analyze thoroughly the issue of urban rationality.

The author considers interdisciplinary tendencies in the social sciences in the context of the idea of universal rationality. She discusses the concept of moderate unificationism in the philosophy of science by Philip Kitcher. The author provides some arguments against the concept of universal rationality by Ralph Wedgwood. She argues that the key disadvantage of Wedgwood’s project is that it pays too much attention to one’s mental states. However, the author claims that the mental states reduction is an unnecessary step for the reconstruction of one’s rationality. Meanwhile, she suggests a way to consider rationality within the juxtaposition of its normative, individual and institutional aspects.

The paper is a short reply to my critics’ comments given on the paper What to Do in Case One Would Like to Keep Dogmas.

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 article analyzes one of the possible approaches to building a new university. Based on a comparison of the functioning of the Humboldtian and Entrepreneurial universities, the author argues that they do not fully satisfy the contemporary needs of society. Focused on freedom of teaching and education through research, the Humboldtian university is currently being found in ruins. It gives scientists the special status of carriers of a certain epistemic authority, which cannot be criticized. The Entrepreneurial university turns scientists into entrepreneurs. They have no particular epistemic authority. As a result, the author concludes that a change in the functioning of universities can be described through a change in the epistemic position of scientists. From those who had a monopoly on knowledge and expertise they have turned into one of many different experts. In this context, the paper suggests considering a new model of the university – the university of expertise. Keeping all valuable from the Humboldtian and Entrepreneurial universities, the new model pays more attention to the formation of competencies associated with the expertise of teachers and students.

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”.