Philosophy Journal of the Higher School of Economics

Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics. Vol. 9 No 3

2025-09-30T21:31:45+03:00

Dear colleagues!

We are pleased to present the 3rd issue of the 9th volume of “Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics”. This issue features articles on logic, history of philosophy, and various fields of practical philosophy — not only (and perhaps not primarily) on philosophy of law and political philosophy, as was the case in the previous issue, but also on ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of media, etc.

The issue opens with the “Logic and Philosophy” section. Zinaida Sokuler discusses the debates surrounding one of the most talked-about contemporary interpretations of the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. Antonina Kon’kova and Vladimir Markin attempt to explicate the propositions of the imaginary (non-Aristotelian) logic of Nikolai Vasiliev (1880–1940). I would like to emphasize that scholarly interest in the legacy of a figure like Vasiliev extends far beyond the confines of logic itself. Therefore, this text may be of interest to a broad philosophical audience. David Khizanishvili applies a cognitive approach to rational belief revision. The section concludes with an article by Georgy Filatov and Maksim Evstigneev, dedicated to the concept of philosophical analysis in the legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and Peter Frederick Strawson.

The “History of Philosophy” section features two studies. Dmitry Fedchuk compares the approaches of Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas to the theoretical apprehension of God by the intellect. Anna Platanova writes about how Nikolai Berdyaev, by critiquing Martin Heidegger, managed to formulate his own philosophy as existential. This article may contribute to discussions about whether we can consider Heidegger a representative of existential philosophy.

The “Practical Philosophy” section presents five studies. The section begins with an ambitious and, in a good sense, polemical article by Sophia Tikhonova and Lada Shipovalova. The authors postulate that digital technologies have reshaped social institutions and structures of knowledge production and distribution. As a result, in the authors’ view, mediality becomes a key characteristic of the current stage of science development. And since science performs the communicative functions of media, Sophia Tikhonova and Lada Shipovalova propose the new term “mediascience”. You can read about what it is in the article. I believe our readers will enjoy debating the given position. Elena Timoshina returns to the topic of the philosophy of law, which began in the 2nd issue of the 9th volume. The author examines one version of the rehabilitation of the common good, namely “common good constitutionalism”, and the debate surrounding this project. Mikhail Stepanov attempts to tackle a rather complex issue — he aims to contextualize contemporary republican theory. The complexity lies in the fact that republicanism as a contemporary theory is highly contradictory, and this is exactly what the author is grappling with. Ivan Snetkov explores the problem of the need to integrate moral values into the architecture of artificial intelligence systems. Finally, Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina analyzes the paintings of Paul Cézanne, using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological teaching as the methodological framework.

In the “Publications and Translations” section, we continue publishing the translation of George Dalgarno’s treatise “The Art of Signs”. The publication of the fifth and sixth chapters of the treatise is preceded by an introductory note by Natalia Osminskaya, the editor of the translation. I am particularly pleased to note that this translation of the treatise has been carried out for several years now as part of a student-led initiative project. The translators and commentators for the fifth and sixth chapters were Emil Rakhmankulov, Renata Idrisova, and Ilya Onegin. In the “Reflections on a Book” section, Maria Marey reflects on the Russian translation (2025) of Carl Schmitt’s “The Tyranny of Values”. The “Academic Life” section provides a detailed overview of the already Sixth Bibikhin Readings, held at the Faculty of Humanities of the HSE University on June 27–28, 2025.

Thank you, dear readers, for your interest in the journal.

Alexander Pavlov

Philosophy as Overcoming of Philosophy

2025-10-04T23:08:10+03:00

The so-called “resolute” interpretation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is actively discussed in recent literature, is considered. Its proponents demand from Wittgenstein's researchers and followers to finally take seriously Wittgenstein's words that he who has understood him should recognize all his propositions as senseless. “Resolution” consists in recognizing the need to fulfill this Wittgensteinian demand concluding his Tractatus. Proponents of this interpretation insist that the distinction made by many authors between mere nonsense and nonsense that is full of deep sense, illuminating, fraught with insight, etc., distorts the goal of the Tractatus. They insist that there is no doctrine, no concept or theory in the said work of Wittgenstein: neither about the essence of the world and language, nor about the essence of proposition, nor about the logical, nor about the need to distinguish between what can be said and what can only be shown by propositions. The main arguments of the defenders of the “resolute” interpretation are analyzed: indication of the misuse of talking about what cannot be said; the interpretation of the metaphor of the ladder to be discarded; the quotations to which they appeal; the perspective of a unified treatment of Wittgenstein's evolution and philosophy, which stands now as directed from beginning to end toward the one goal of eliminating philosophical problems by showing the senselessness of the expressions in which they are formulated. It is emphasized that the “resolute” interpretation leaves unexplained why all the sentences of the Tractatus were written. How can one devote years of one's own life to philosophy while clinging to the conviction that it is all made up of nonsense to be discarded? And if one finds this implausible, how then Wittgenstein's own words about the senselessness of philosophical statements and problems can be understood? It is shown that the weakness of “resolute interpreters” is due to the fact that they have too narrow an understanding of the function of propositions, of the role they can play. Therefore, their criteria for distinguishing sentences into senseful and senseless ones are too narrow.

Existence Judgments and Nikolai Vasiliev's Imaginary Logic

2025-10-04T23:06:56+03:00

The paper attempts to explicate the judgements of N.A. Vasiliev's imaginary logic with the usage of the existence judgments. The existential judgment in traditional logic was understood as a judgement, the predicate of which is the term “exists” and the subject is a certain term or a sequence of terms. According to some predecessors of modern logic, existential judgements have a more fundamental status than attributive judgements, so that the latter can be reduced to the former. As a modern reconstruction of imaginary logic, this paper considers the IL suggested by T.P. Kostyuk and V.I. Markin in the article “Formal Reconstruction of Imaginary Logic by N.A. Vasiliev” (1998). On the base of the analysis of Vasiliev's texts, it is shown that the formal semantics of this system quite well corresponds to the interpretation of judgements of imaginary logic which was kept in mind by the author himself. The way the language is constructed allows to make the formal recording of existential judgements for the case when three extensional characteristics are associated with each general term: not only its extension and anti-extension, but also a contradictory domain of this term. A semantics which uses the same class of models as in IL logic is formulated for this language. The translation of the IL formulas into this language is formulated and it is proved that the truth conditions of judgements in IL-models logic are equivalent to the truth conditions of their translations in the “imaginary” logic of existential judgements (ILΥ logic). The latter means that a given translation embeds IL into ILΥ. An analytic-tableau formalization of the ILΥ logic is carried out. The soundness and completeness theorems are also proved. A decision procedure is formulated to solve the problem of provability for an arbitrary formula of the ILΥ language by the analytic tableau method. This procedure provides an adequate algorithm for checking the validity of any statement (including any syllogism) of imaginary logic.

Rational Belief Revision

2025-10-04T23:09:12+03:00

The article analyzes the concept of rational belief change, or revision, in the context of persuasive communication. The standard idea of rationality as following the rules of formal logic results in such idealized criteria of rational belief revision that achieving them proves impossible due to limited human cognitive abilities. Therefore, the criteria of rationality based on the requirements of formal logic cannot serve as a source of prescriptive norms of rational belief revision. Approaches within the bounded rationality paradigm attempt to take into account these cognitive limitations in order to create prescriptive norms that could in principle be achieved by participants in persuasive communication. Such limitations usually include limited memory and computational abilities. However, as many studies in cognitive science show, in most cases of real-life uses of reasoning, the cause of erroneous beliefs and suboptimal decision-making is not the mentioned above limitations, but rather certain characteristics of cognitive mechanisms usually associated with processes that are referred to as type 1 processes (system 1) in dual process theories. The article substantiates the need to supplement prescriptive norms of rational belief revision taking into account these characteristics so that these norms are not only satisfiable in principle, but also achievable in practice. Specific ways of supplementing these norms are suggested.

Grammar, Map and Therapy

2025-10-04T23:06:31+03:00

This paper is dedicated to the concept of philosophical analysis in work of three classics of analytic philosophy: Ryle, Strawson and Wittgenstein. These philosophers, as many in their generations, believe that philosophical analysis does not bring forth new knowledge, it simply brings clarity into our ways of speaking. However, despite the main stream of analytical philosophy of 20th century, they take metaphors that philosophers use seriously. They use it to make “moves” in the argument and explain with the help of different metaphilosophical metaphors their general philosophical approach. Thier projects differ in goals, style, and also in key metaphilosophical metaphors by which our philosophers explain what they are doing. Ryle compares philosophical analysis with a work of a carthographer. This metaphor allows him to formulate the doctrine of analysis in a form of conceptual geography. Wittgenstein, in contrast, despite the fact of using the map-metaphor, makes a metaphor of therapy the central metaphor of his metaphilosophy. A philosophical problem is a disease that needs to be cured. Strawson opposes the metaphors and conceptions of Ryle and Wittgenstein. He does it by introducing a third metaphor. Philosophy is now analogous to a study of language grammar. The goal of such grammatical philosophy is to explicate the fundamental conceptual scheme of our thinking about the world. According to Strawson, there is a possibility of systematic analytical philosophy, and his metaphor offers a way to think about it. Wittgenstein, in contrast, discards any attempt to do analysis in a systematic way, while Ryle stays somewhere in the middle. Our reconstruction not only explicates these metaphilosophical differences, but also allows us to pay attention to the fact that, as it seems to be, all three philosophers transcend their own “official” formulations of a doctrine of analysis.

The Finite Intellect's Cognition of the Infinite Essence of God in Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas

2025-10-04T23:08:35+03:00

Of historical and philosophical interest is the comparison of the approach to the theoretical grasping of God by the intellect of Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. Maimonides justifies his prohibition against the predication of essential attributes to the Creator by pointing out the inadmissibility of the introduction of plurality by reason into His absolute unity. Thomas develops a concept that makes it possible to think of an infinite being without compromising its ontological simplicity but at the same time such a being becomes accessible to thought without introducing those tautologies into which Maimonides' metaphysics and theology fall when he repeats the same formulations of the nature of the One which have a meaning close to the text of the Torah. Other variants of Maimonides' speech about the First are forbidden. It was Aquinas' thinking through the meanings of esse that made it possible to philosophically substantiate the knowledge of God by analogy. For the existence of the First Cause and the existence of the finite thing are different modes of existence. However, we conceive of different kinds of existence implying that the meaning of being of the First Cause is accessible to us only in a very approximate mode of understanding. Really the human intellect grasps the Esse as the essence of the Creator Himself through his correlation with the being of finite things — analogously. The maximum has no limit and therefore is inaccessible to rational thinking in the fullness of its quidditas, but thinking is satisfied with an incomplete understanding of the essential properties of the First Principle.

Nikolai Berdyaev and Martin Heidegger

2025-10-04T23:07:09+03:00

This article examines the concepts of time of Nikolai Berdyaev and Martin Heidegger, key figures of Russian and German existentialism. The aim of this article is to identify the consonance between the philosophy of time expressed in Martin Heidegger's “Being and Time” and the project of Nikolai Berdyaev's philosophy of time, and to show what role Heidegger's critique of the philosophy of time played for Berdyaev's later definition of his philosophy as existential. The paper shows that both Berdyaev and Heidegger set themselves the task of overcoming a certain type of ontology (which substantiated both a number of positive sciences and even a special type of theology) that objectifies what Berdyaev calls primal reality. However, from Berdyaev's point of view, Heidegger did not succeed in bringing his project to its logical conclusion and creating a philosophy of primordial realities: he remained within the framework of objectified metaphysics, whereas Berdyaev, who returned to Kant's dualistic understanding of reality, succeeds in philosophically expressing the reality of spirit and in showing the multidimensionality of time, which reveals itself differently in different states of reality. Philosophy, which overcomes the plan of objectification and is not itself the objectification of the ultimate foundations of being, Berdyaev calls existential.

Mediascience as an Actor of a New Social Ontology

2025-10-04T23:06:43+03:00

The article deals with the current stage of the development of science. The authors analyze it from the perspective of a broad social context, showing the congruence of processes that are key factors of scientific development today, and determine it “from within” and “from outside”. These are digital technologies, the widest social spread of which in a digital society has reformatted both social institutions and the structures of production and distribution of knowledge. On the one hand, institutions have ceased to be closed autonomous worlds, at the micro level they open up into spaces and fields of horizontal digital networks. Smart crowd technologies connect the institute of science with activists, volunteers, and enthusiasts through the practice of citizen science. On the other hand, digital technologies permeate the methodology of modern science, starting with the instrument base of natural sciences and ending with the tools of digital humanities. At the same time, the development of digital technologies themselves, the immediate prospect of which is strong artificial intelligence, is inextricably linked with scientific research. Since digital technologies belong to the socio-ontological category of “media”, so mediality is a key characteristic of the modern stage of the development of science. It is also manifested in the strengthening of the mediating functions of science: the territory of the dialogue between science and society is no longer reduced to pragmatic processes of negotiations on the needs of science and the axiological calibration of its goals. Expert scientific practices channel discussions on acute social problems, setting the boundaries of their fundamental solvability, and transdisciplinary practices of knowledge production and distribution mediate the main array of social actions. The authors consider the need for a conceptual shift regarding science in the context of modern social ontology, as well as its possibility in the context of modern scientific research. At the same time, they come to the conclusion that science performs the communicative functions of media in modern society and on this basis propose the term “media science” to fix the specifics of its modern stage.

Common Good Constitutinonalism

2025-10-04T23:07:46+03:00

The article examines the modern project of rehabilitation of the common good, a concept of the classical natural law tradition, proposed by Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule in the postliberal concept of “common good constitutionalism”, as well as the broad polemic around this project. The first section provides a sketch of the main provisions of the postliberal program, the main message of which is the revival of the feelings and practices of social solidarity destroyed by liberalism. The subject of the second section is the concept of common good constitutionalism itself. We show the inconsistency of Vermeule's understanding of the common good both in itself and in relation to individual rights, which is connected with the use of the Thomist notion of the common good without taking into account the transcendent perspective of human purposes implied by this notion. Since Vermeule does not present any vision of human nature, without clarification of which the concept of the common good cannot be clarified, the third section presents M. Foran's development of his concept, focusing on the natural-law justification of dignity in relation to the common good. The last section is devoted to a critical discussion of Vermeule's conception. Critics claim common good constitutionalism rejects the liberal ideal of moral neutrality and the intervention of religious morality in law with the support of state institutions. However, it would be more accurate to diagnose this concept as an attempt to justify the possibility of replacing the morality of a secular society, promoted through the same political institutions, with religious morality. It has been noted that the common good constitutionalism formed within Catholic integralism resembles the project of the Grand Inquisitor described by Dostoevsky, in which the “kingdom of peace and happiness” was built on miracles, mystery, and authority. In Vermeule's project we find the authority of the ruler, the secret of the common good inaccessible to the subjects, and the miracle of abundance and prosperity gratefully accepted by the subjects. A review of the polemics surrounding Vermeule's conception leads to the conclusion that there is a deep division within the American legal community in understanding the foundations, features, and ways of development of the U.S. constitutional tradition.

Republicanism: The Practice of Conceptualization

2025-10-04T23:09:00+03:00

After the revival of republicanism in the second half of the 20th century by representatives of the Cambridge School of political thought, it continues to be one of the most sought-after areas in modern political philosophy. However, despite its relatively wide popularity, there are a number of serious conceptual problems in its understanding. One of them is the existence of a coherent tradition of republican thought. To solve this problem, it is necessary first of all to turn to the rich experience of conceptualizing republicanism, which became the subject of the proposed article. The author examines the meaning put by modern republican theorists into the concept of “republicanism”, as well as how their views are consistent with each other. Special attention is paid to the history of the term “republicanism”, as well as the question of the relationship between the terms “republicanism” and “neo-republicanism”. A number of regional and synthetic approaches to understanding Republicanism are analyzed in detail. The author shows that modern republican theory is rather heterogeneous and contradictory. Representatives of different approaches sometimes seriously disagree on the key points of its conceptual content, which significantly complicates the development of an understanding of republicanism that would allow us to speak of it as having an internal unity of political thought. In the conclusion, based on the data obtained, an attempt has also been made to identify topics that overlap in the approaches considered, which can become a starting point for further research in this area.

Metaethical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Alignment

2025-10-04T23:08:23+03:00

The article investigates the alignment problem, which concerns the integration of moral values into the architecture of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to mitigate existential risks. It examines conceptual approaches to addressing the alignment problem, including the utilitarian principles proposed by S. Russell and E. Yudkowsky's concept of “coherent extrapolated volition”. The study introduces the notion of a “meta-alignment problem”. Through an analysis of the conceptual distinction between “strong” and “weak AI, the author concludes that these categories necessitate distinct approaches to resolving the alignment problem. The article evaluates existing methodological approaches to tackling this issue, including the “principles-to-practice” approach and the “practice-oriented approach, highlighting their limitations, such as difficulties in operationalizing moral principles and accommodating individual moral preferences. It also explores the potential of “hybrid” approaches. The consideration of metaethical foundations is proposed as a means to address a key challenge in hybrid approaches, namely the ambiguity surrounding the criteria for data “quality”. The study advocates for the use of conceptual models of morality developed within metaethics — specifically non-naturalism (intuitionism) and moral naturalism — as a foundation for devising new hybrid alignment strategies. The non-naturalist approach relies on moral intuitions explored through experimental philosophy, enabling the reconciliation of individual and collective moral intuitions by bridging value gaps between humans and AI. In contrast, the naturalist approach draws on neurobiological data to identify moral “facts”, rendering AI systems more transparent and predictable. Metaethical foundations significantly influence AI design, and their explicit consideration not only facilitates the development of effective alignment methodologies but also allows for empirical evaluation of the viability of metaethical approaches in addressing the alignment problem. The article contributes to the discourse on the metaethical foundations of AI alignment. It proposes directions for future research and outlines potential pathways for aligning AI systems with moral values.

In the Eye of Cézanne, in the Spirit of Merleau-Ponty

2025-10-04T23:07:58+03:00

The article analyzes the painting of Paul Cézanne through the fundamental relationship seeing-seen (voyant-visible), set out in the phenomenological teaching of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and conceptualized by us as the “dialectic of the seeing-seen”. For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne had a special status as a “painter of painting”: the phenomenology of visible of Merleau-Ponty and his interpretation of Cézanne's works are built on each other. However, the philosopher himself and researchers did not systematically superimpose the dialectic of seeing-seen on Cézanne, which is why our article is the original extension of the work of Merleau-Ponty himself. The proposed approach is interdisciplinary, since in addition to the apparatus of the phenomenology of visible itself, it also uses art history formal analysis. We consider the origins of the special status of Cézanne's painting for Merleau-Ponty through the artist's works themselves and offer the extension of Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of the philosophical content of his painting. We apply the dialectic of seeing-seen both to painting as an artifact and to the act of painting itself in relation to (i) how the artist sees and (ii) what exactly is seen. We distinguish three areas of the visible in painting (nature, an artifact, and the Other) on the basis of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and note that they resonate with three painting genres: landscape, still life, and portrait. We also, in the spirit of the phenomenology of visible, conceptualize, on the basis of Cezanne's painting, two poles of painting vision: “gestalt-inarticulate” and “formed-naming”.

Theory of Categories in George Dalgarno's Treatise “Ars signorum”

2025-10-04T23:07:21+03:00

The paper deals with logical and epistemological grounds of the universal philosophical language created by G. Dalgarno and presented in his “Ars Signorum” (1661). The author argues that the predicamental series established by Dalgarno as a basis for the Lexicon of his artificial language is much more consistent than it was supposed to be by several researchers (M. Slaughter, J. Maat). Thus, the first division of highest genus “being” (ens, res) into “abstract being” and “concrete being” indicates the difference between mental and extra-mental beings which was a common place in metaphysical works of that time elaborated under the nominalistic influence (for example, in Suárez's “Disputationes Metaphysicae”). Accordingly, an unusual and even stricking trichotomous division of “ens” into “substance”, “accident” and “concrete” offered by Dalgarno instead of the traditional dichotomous scheme is quite reasonable as far as the terms “substance” and “accident” indicate mental concepts that refer to “the most common respects of the things”. The author concludes that Dalgarno's reform of predicamental series was aimed to refuse from scholastic essentialism and was deeply connected with Pansophia of J. Comenius. Thus, the main Dalgarno's point was to use as few radical words as possible in his Lexicon, because in this way a speaker could combine new words from them and so retain logical consistence of the whole speech, and it was the very same idea of Comenius that learning of languages should correlate with the investigation of things, so that the speaker should be able to think about the world order and about God as its first cause.

Ars signorum

2025-10-04T23:07:33+03:00

Translation of chapters I-IV was published previously in: Dalgarno, G. 2024. “Iskusstvo znakov [Ars signorum]: ili universal’nyy kharakter i filosofskiy yazyk... [Vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica]” [in Russian], trans. from the Latin and annot. by E. B. Rakhmankulov, R. D. Idrisova, I. S. Onegin, V. A. Yanin; ed. by N. A. Osminskaya. Filosofiya. Zhurnal Vysshey shkoly ekonomiki [Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics] 8 (2), 331–382.

Translation of: The Works of George Dalgarno of Aberdeen. 1834. Edinburgh: T. Constable. P. 48–59.

Carl Schmitt's “The Tyranny of Values”

2025-10-04T23:06:16+03:00

Reflections on a Book: Schmitt, C. 2025. Tiraniya tsennostey [Die Tyrannei der Werte] [in Russian]. Trans. from the German BY O.V. Kil’dyushov. Moskva [Moscow]: Praksis.

The Sixth Bibikhin Readings

2025-10-04T23:08:47+03:00

The Sixth Bibikhin Readings: An Overview of the All-Russian Scientific Conference