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The article analyzes an episode of the Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus about the harm of writing to human cognitive abilities. Relying on a number of ancient sources, the author shows that the Greeks of the classical and earlier periods gave priority to the oral word over the written one, primarily in the field of legal proceedings, where written evidence was not considered self-sufficient, could easily be challenged in court by the opposing party and performed only an auxiliary function. The article also exposes the myth about the exclusive role of writing in the formation and development of ancient civilizations in general and Ancient Greece in particular. It is emphasized that even after the acquisition of writing, many cultures were wary of it, seeing the danger of degradation. It was believed that a person who entrusted information to paper, parchment, or clay tablets ceased to develop memory and to use the brain as a means of storing information. In addition, important and secret information placed on a particular material carrier is in danger of being stolen, read by enemies or ill-wishers, destroyed in a fire, natural disasters, etc. The author of the article notes that the “oral culture”, which was the property not only of the Greeks but also all Indo-European peoples, has not disappeared, remaining in the field of the most important information – when making secret political decisions, in the military sphere, etc. The hypothesis is put forward that the catastrophe of the Dark Ages, which plunged Greece and other Mediterranean countries into the darkness of ignorance and barbarism for three centuries, could have been a consequence of the introduction of writing.Having lost the ability to memorize long texts and entrusting the most important information to “external carriers”, people of the Bronze Age could easily lose it for a number of reasons. The price of progress turned out to be extremely high for the peoples of the Mycenaean era. Recalling the consequences of that collapse, the author of the article calls for more careful consideration of the arguments deployed by modern opponents of digitalization. 

Keywords: history of philosophy, oral civilizations, Ancient Greece, Plato, Phaedrus, writing, memory, digitalization

The machine is an intermediary between the natural reality and the impossible reality up to a point. Therefore, understanding this phenomenon in the ontological dimension is a necessary element in the analysis of the problems of both the present and the future. In the philosophy of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, the concept of a machine is very relevant. Machinism develops around it as a worldview and philosophical direction. However, the machine remains “understandable by default” for it: this concept acts as a tool for analyzing society, culture or the psyche. This turns out to be possible by ignoring a significant part of the semantic spectrum of μηχανή. The exception is the mechanology of Jacques Lafitte and Gilbert Simondon, which is interested in the machine as a particular invention. In this article, the methodology of machine analysis relies on the object-oriented ontology by Ian Bogost. Based on the conducted research, a number of conclusions has been made. Firstly, it is possible to talk about the identity of reality and the machine only for the basic ontological level; a person has created an artifact, which is an objectified ontological constituent. However, at the next, higher level, this identity falls apart: the machine is what it is, because it does not coincide with natural reality being distinguished by the nature of its existence. The invention of the machine is an ontological work in its nature: it is the creation of an interaction system of one-dimensional spaces. In its reasoning, machinism does not take into account these conceptual points using the machine as a metaphor. Therefore, its conceptual resources interfere with the understanding of modern machines and their interaction with humans. Secondly, some modern inventions in the field of generative artificial intelligence are new types of machines (non-classical machines) that include the factor of probability and ambiguity as an element of the mechanism. Human invention is reaching a new ontological level, which requires an updated conceptual toolkit. 

Keywords: machine, invention, machinism, mechanism, philosophy of the machine, machine ontology, non-classical machine, artificial intelligence, neural network

The modern philosophy of science is genetically related to the formed in the modern era classical philosophy of science. The latter, in turn, was formed under the influence of developments in the New European (“new”) science in the late 16^th – 18^th centuries. The new European science has acquired the status of classical one, because it is the initial stage of the modern type of science. The distinctive feature of this modern type is that experiment has become its basis and method. The article reveals the specifics of experiment as an activity associated with the search for facts that can confirm or refute an assumption/theory/law. An overview of the emergence of the experimental method in natural science and humanities is carried out. The concepts of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant are considered as varieties of classical philosophy of science. It is concluded that in the case of Francis Bacon, the philosophy of science represents a methodology of science, extremely approximated to and aimed at the objective world studied by science, revealing the laws of experimental activity and the rules of the method of induction, which make exploration of nature possible. This type of philosophy of science runs from Francis Bacon to Auguste Comte and the whole positivist tradition. The second type of classical philosophy of science constitutes the axiomatic-deductive methodology of science. It has its origin in the philosophy of René Descartes and brings science and philosophy quite closely together, since in this methodology it is philosophy that sets the fundamentals/axioms of the deductive method. This branch leads to Hegel and the phenomenological tradition. Immanuel Kant builds a critical methodology that claims to overcome the limitations of both empirical-inductive and axiomatic-deductive methodologies. In this methodology, experiment is comprehended through such a concept as “the limits of possible experience”. A peculiar continuation of the Kantian variety of the philosophy of science is the critical rationalism by Karl Popper. 

Keywords: philosophy of science, methodology of science, experiment, empirical-inductive method, axiomatic-deductive method, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Vladimir I. Vernadsky

The article attempts to reconstruct the influence of Hegelianism on the French intellectual milieu of the 1930s–60s represented by its leading figures. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that French philosophy is often associated with the idea of overcoming Hegel, without taking into account his influence, including on anti-Hegelians. To address this issue, the author turns to the theories by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, as well as their role in the formation of four famous philosophers. The first part of the article examines Kojève’s anthropological interpretation of Hegel and its influence on Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan. It demonstrates that each of them developed his own anthropology starting from the themes that were in the focus of their teacher: negation, desire, and the struggle for recognition. They build their discourse around the analysis of the phenomenon of scarcity and the power of negativity in human existence. At the same time, they intend to move beyond Hegel and Kojève, discarding the idea of the end of history. Georges Bataille does this by appealing to the data of ethnology, and Jacques Lacan by developing his own concept of psychoanalysis. The second part of the article deals with the ontological interpretation of Hegel developed by Jean Hyppolite, which influenced Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. In his commentaries on Hegel, Hyppolite criticized Kojève’s subjectivism and shifted the focus from the individual to the history of the concept and language. His followers also try to overcome anthropology and humanism within the framework of their own philosophical projects – Marxism in the case of Louis Althusser and Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge. Both thinkers started from the idea of a process without a subject and the critique of essentialism developed by their teacher. Along with this, they also use his concepts to turn them against Hegel’s determinism and teleologism. The author of the article draws attention to the fact that it was Hegelianism that anticipated some of the provisions of structuralism. It is concluded that Hegelianism was a prevailing condition for the emergence of the idea of overcoming Hegel in France. 

Keywords: Hegel, French Hegelianism, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, anthropology, negativity, desire, end of history

The article attempts a critical philosophical analysis of the ways to reinvent the production of contemporary media culture on the example of two franchises, “The Last of Us” and “Cyberpunk 2077”. Modern media culture is a complex mechanism ensuring the transmission of various messages through the production and subsequent human consumption of media products. Douglas Kellner, following Jean Baudrillard, positions media culture as a spectacle for pleasure. In the digital space, media culture includes a number of mediums, such as video games, movies, music, etc. Since postmodernism is an integral part of modern capitalism, the production of media culture for profit involves the (re)invention of various media texts. Using philosophical vocabulary, the example of the franchises “The Last of Us” and “Cyberpunk 2077” show how such media culture products are created. Simulation, pastichization, and remediation become tools for the production of contemporary media text and thus refer to what has already been produced. The article presents an analysis of video games as a simulative space within the framework of the philosophical categories of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Gilles Deleuze. The author also analyzes the genre component of franchises using the proposed by Fredric Jameson terminology of pastiche, and the developed by David Bolter and Richard Grusin concept of remediation. Within the “The Last of Us” franchise we can see that the transition from one medium to another, from a video game to a film, is an actively used way of copying media text. When such copying occurs, there is a loss of interactivity with the media text, which can negatively affect the consumer experience. In the “Cyberpunk 2077” franchise the same transition not only does not impair the consumer’s interaction with the media text but complements it by connecting the stories of two different mediums with each other. It is concluded that the analyzed franchises, having a similar base of production, diverge in terms of creativity, showcasing the potential approaches through which media culture products can undergo reimagining and reinvention. 

Keywords: media culture, critical analysis, pastiche, simulation, simulacrum, remediation, cyberpunk, horror, zombie

When directly elected presidents have fairly strong power in relations with the government and parliament, presidential elections are perceived as elections of the first order. In addition, voting for presidential candidates is much more personalized. To a large extent, this explains why, in Russia, the candidate of the party of power receives much more support in the presidential election than the party of power in parliamentary ones. Some voters who support opposition parties in the parliamentary elections vote “strategically” and “personally” in the presidential ones, giving their votes to the incumbent. However, the question remains how evenly this trend spreads across different segments of the electorate of political parties. To answer it, a comparative analysis of the 2016 parliamentary and 2018 presidential elections was carried out. Empirically, the study is based on electoral and socio-economic data in the context of municipalities. The analysis carried out by the method of multilevel linear regression has exposed that the line “party of power versus opposition” is quite clearly expressed in the parliamentary and blurred in the presidential elections. Based on the results obtained, it is concluded that personalized voting has a key impact on the difference in the results of political parties and their candidates. At the same time, both the consolidation of voters around the incumbent and the loss of votes by the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) affect different segments of the electorate approximately equally, that is, the specifics of the electorate of these parties in the presidential election is leveled but it remains. With regard to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), on the contrary, insufficient affiliation of its candidate with the party led to the fact that different segments of the electorate changed their preferences unevenly. The final part of the article outlines promising directions for further research. 

Keywords: elections, incumbent, party of power, opposition, electorate, personal voting, comparative analysis

New books by staff, Institute of Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of the RAS