Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): Contemporary Philosophy
Dear colleagues!
Summer and even a third of autumn have passed since we last interacted. The editorial staff of Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics hopes that you managed to have a proper rest and to read the latest published issue in full. But now we are eager to share with you the contents of the third issue.
The issue opens with the “Practical Philosophy” section. In it, Maria Marey analyzes the agonistic turn in Chantal Mouffe’s theory of democracy. Sophia Tikhonova explores figurative models of media philosophy that reveal the transition from technological determinism to media ontology and temporal eventfulness. Comparing several models, Sophia Tikhonova proposes understanding media communication as a cultural interface that integrates different dimensions of mediality and combines the logics of literal and optical grammatization. Georgy Moiseev, drawing on the legacy of Michel Foucault (whose major anniversary we are still marking this year), reflects on the phenomenon of algorithmic power, which inherits from biopolitics preventive governance and governance through the milieu, but functions outside the production of meaning, relying on continuous control and the optimization of correlations. Georgy Moiseev argues that this power operates within the cybernetic paradigm, and that its pervasive spread leads to the erosion of the public sphere. Egor Sipko focuses on the video game Alan Wake 2, understood as a postmodern text in which interactivity deepens ontological questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Egor Sipko believes that the metanarrative structure of Alan Wake 2 clearly demonstrates the ontological instability immanent to the digital medium.
The “History of Philosophy” section in this issue is represented by the history of Russian philosophy. In his piece, Andrey Teslya examines the image of Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky in the texts and memoirs of Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov, who was among the first to attend the university lectures of the legendary historian. Andrey Teslya systematically analyzes Rozanov's remarks about Klyuchevsky, spanning the period from the first printed mention to entries from 1917–1918. As a result, the author reconstructs a dynamic image of Klyuchevsky which, in the late period of Rozanov’s work, served the thinker as a kind of “mirror” reflecting his own aspirations and providing material for self-criticism.
In the “Intellectual History” section, the focus is mainly on medieval Spain, though there is also a little England and France, as well as the Francoist period. For example, Oleg Aurov devotes his article to the role of the religious factor in the territorial-administrative organization of free communities (concejo) in the cities of Central Spain at the turn of the 13th–14th centuries. The compact settlement by ethno-confessional quarters in these cities is explained by the limited subjectivity of the concejo, because of which the community was forced to adapt to existing ecclesiastical forms. Mikhail Birkin reads Canon 13 of the Second Council of Seville (619) — an anti-Monophysite treatise consisting of biblical and patristic quotations — in order to identify the mechanisms by which authoritative theological utterances were formed at the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Pavel Bychkov examines the evolution of the metaphor of the mystical body of the Church in the late Middle Ages, when it ceased to be associated with the figure of the Pope and began to justify the divine authority of Christ and the importance of the faithful themselves. As a result, the metaphor, initially symbolizing papal authority, turned into a polemical instrument of supporters of Conciliarism, secular poets, and defenders of the independence of secular power. Daria Samsonova, using a constructivist approach, analyzes conceptions of tradition in the narratives of the Female Section of the Spanish Falange (1934–1977) under the leadership of Pilar Primo de Rivera. Using memoirs, speeches, and programmatic documents, Daria Samsonova explores tradition not as an unchanging heritage but as a dynamic ideological instrument for legitimizing Francoist power and forming national identity.
In the “Logic and Epistemology” section there is an article by Arsentii Timokhin, which is a metatheoretical study of CRW — a consistent connexive relevant logic without the contraction axiom. The semantics of this logic is based on the notion of a commutative monoid, whose elements are substantively interpreted as finite collections of empirical dossiers — concrete observations, experiments, and measurements. In the “Philosophical Essays” section, Sergey Nickolsky argues that the phenomena of the “Soviet” and the “new Soviet man” are a natural continuation of centuries-old constants of Russian history — imperialism, autocracy, and the fusion of power and property. According to Sergey Nickolsky, the Soviet system cultivated in citizens a readiness to submit to the will of authority, making this quality a fundamental property of Soviet man. The author calls for overcoming the Soviet legacy.
In “Publications and Translations” we have two items. These are the first chapters of the first book of the treatise On the Sovereignty of the King by the French jurist Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655), in translation and with commentary by Gulnara Bayazitova and Ivan Sakharchuk, as well as the next part of Introduction to the Refutation of the Quran by Ludovicus Marracius, in translation and with commentary by Ivan Lupandin and Grigory Konson. In “Book Reviews,” Denis Lukshin reflects on Anastasia Medova’s monograph Phenomenology of Musical Experience, while Anastasiya Veretennikova and Marina Urtenova reflect on the book by medievalist philologist Fernando Gómez Redondo about Molinism. In the same section there is a review of a book by classical philologist Edmund Cueva about the ancient background of the vampire film The Hunger (1983). The “Academical Life” section is represented by our traditional report on the Bibikhin Readings, this time the seventh. The material was prepared by Aleksei Durnev.
Enjoy your reading, dear colleagues!
Alexander Pavlov
