Metamorphoses of the Ideal

For Evald Il’enkov, philosophy is a science of the ideal. Il’enkov spent his entire life researching the logical and historical metamorphoses of the ideal. In general, he considered the ideal as a relation between at least two different things, one of which adequately represents the essence of another. At various times Il’enkov explored quite a few ideal phenomena: forms of value and forms of property, personality and talent, language, music and fine arts, not to mention numerous categories of dialectics, ethics, and aesthetics. The article also addresses the problem: which of these phenomena is the most typical and adequate form of being of the ideal?.     

Was Il’enkov an Aesthetician?

E. V. Il’enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il’enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty.     

Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian

In Russian negative sentences the verb’s direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific “genitive-of-negation” phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers’ active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.     

真是"按照西方学术界的习惯用法"吗?--质疑徐崇温同志的"西方马克思主义"概念

西方马克思主义概念在西方学者那里主要有两种不同的用法。一种是梅劳一庞蒂的用法,即用它指称一种以卢卡奇的《历史与阶级意识》为代表的主要与列宁主义相对立的理论;另一种是安德森的用法,即用它指称包括从卢卡奇到阿尔都塞等13人在内的第三代马克思主义者的理论。徐崇温同志通过对这两种不同用法的一种毫无道理的综合,将他“西方马克思主义”概念定义为20世纪20年代以后在西方资本主义国家出现的一股非马克思主义思潮。这显然不是“西方学术界的习惯用法”。     

Volunteering,social ministry and ethical-behavioural attitudes in post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Christianity

This article explores the principles of volunteer mobilisation in social ministry and diaconal practices in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. I focus on the main types of faith-based volunteer associations, assistance organisations and official Orthodox centres of social ministry that recruit volunteers. While analysing the mechanisms of attracting volunteers and the types of motivations, I identified two main models of organising communities and social groups: an authoritarian-mystical model and a socially open one. Ethical-behavioural preferences and attitudes determine the motivation of volunteers, as do gender, confessional and ideological-political factors. The analysis is based on both empirical data obtained through interviews with parish priests, organisers of church-based assistance organisations and volunteer associations, and homiletic theological and moral-didactic literature produced within Russian Orthodox Church circles and in official Church documents. I also consider the motivation of volunteers and their ethical-behavioural attitudes in the Russian Orthodox theological context. The article also analyses theological approaches in Russian Orthodoxy, inspired by modern developments in psychology, including self-determination theory and psychological autonomy, as well as ‘humanitarian-anthropological theology’.     

生态学马克思主义与马克思主义的当代发展——《自然的理由——生态学马克思主义研究》述评

要发展马克思主义,首先必须构建发展马克思主义的当代基点和平台。实现马克思主义与生态学的结合,是发展马克思主义的理论基点之一。西方生态学马克思主义试图运用马克思主义的立场、观点和方法,揭示马克思主义与生态学的关联,揭示资本主义的反生态性质和社会主义与生态发展的兼容性,是西方马克思主义者试图发展马克思主义的当代尝试。     

“从翻译的视角看马克思主义在中国的传播和接受”专题——翻译与马克思主义中国化

文章从翻译的视角入手,探讨了马克思主义在中国的早期传播和接受,指出马克思主义经典著作在中国的译介,经由了一个错综复杂的过程,摘译、节译特别是转译值得细致考察。翻译发挥了历史规划和主体召唤的巨大作用。从对等词的选择和思想的把握等方面来看,马克思主义在中国的传播和接受,是晚清以来西学东渐过程的有机组成和延续。     

The development of the political philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

This article follows the development of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy from his 1947 text, Humanism and Terror, through a number of essays in the Adventures of the Dialectic, to the Preface to Signs published in 1959. It shows the process by which Merleau-Ponty escaped the “grip of marxism” as a philosophy of history. It notes the link between his philosophy of history and the concrete historical events of his times, particularly the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into Stalinism. It suggests a certain analogy between Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the October Revolution and Kant’s reflection on the French Revolution. The notion of the universal class of the proletariat is the guiding thread in the analyses of both Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to marxism and the process by which he frees himself from its grip. We observe the role that this concept plays in Humanism and Terror and in the essays on Weber and Lukacs in the Adventure of the Dialectic where we eventually see its dissolution. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty arrives at a new conception of historical meaning which is neither totalizing or empiricist. The paper concludes by presenting an outline of the direction that his philosophy of history took after he extricated himself from marxism. This new philosophy took the form of a critical reflection on the role of the “notion of the hero” in 20th century political philosophy in general, particularly in Heidegger and Sartre.

Differential effects of constraints in the processing of Russian cataphora

Anaphoric relations between pronouns and their antecedents are subject to a number of different linguistic constraints, which exclude the possibility of coreference in specific syntactic or discourse contexts. Constraints on anaphora may, in principle, impact online sentence processing in a couple of different ways. They may act as constraints on the generation of interpretations, preventing illicit anaphoric relations from ever being considered. Alternatively, they may act as later filters on interpretations, rejecting candidate interpretations after initial consideration. A number of previous studies have sought to determine which of these mechanisms accurately describes the online impact of constraints on anaphora. The current studies present evidence that there is no uniform answer to this question, and that the two mechanisms are both used, for different constraints. Evidence for this is drawn from studies on the processing of two constraints on backwards anaphora or cataphora in Russian that apply in superficially similar contexts but that differ in a number of respects. One self-paced reading study and two judgement studies are reported. The self-paced reading study manipulates the gender congruency between a pronoun and a following name in three pairs of conditions. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates no constraints on anaphora a gender mismatch effect was observed following the name, as in previous studies, suggesting that comprehenders actively search for an antecedent following a cataphoric pronoun. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates Principle C of the classical binding theory no effect of the gender manipulation was observed, suggesting that comprehenders do not even consider the possibility of interpretations that violate this constraint. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates a Russian-specific constraint on cataphora a gender match effect was observed following the name, the reverse of the finding in the no-constraint conditions, suggesting that the constraint applies as a filter on candidate interpretations.