Dear colleagues!

As the holiday season approaches, allow us to suggest some leisurely summer reading for you – the second issue of our journal for this year. As always, we have a large section devoted to social and political philosophy. We begin chronologically – with the Middle Ages. Olga Togoeva discusses the medieval Satanprozesse works, which are devoted to fictional legal trials between the devil and humanity. The highlight of the text is that these works are traditionally considered to be “playful” and created for training young lawyers. Olga Togoeva, however, believes that the Satanprozesse works also touch on important theological questions. This means that for the authors of the works under consideration, theological ideas also lay at the heart of the judicial process. You can find out which exactly in the article. From the European Middle Ages, we travel to sixteenth-century England. Anna Seregina writes about the concepts of “freedom of conscience” and “freedom of speech” in English political culture of that period. Admittedly, the Middle Ages are indispensable here as well – the roots of the concept of “freedom of speech” lie precisely there. The main conclusion of the article is that both concepts were common to the political language of Europeans.

There are also research papers in the section from postgraduate students of the School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, HSE University, related to the philosophy of Marxism. Andrés Castañón-Rincón pits analytical Marxism against the philosophy of Evald Ilyenkov. Both proponents of analytical Marxism and Ilyenkov sought to improve Marx's materialist conception of history. They did so in different ways, but equally effectively. Sultanbek Andiyev writes about the outstanding British thinker Raymond Williams, who is little known in Russia. The focus of Andiyev's research is Williams's concepts of communication, utopia, and the future. We hope this material will draw the attention of a wider readership to Williams's work.

In the same section, Dmitry Davydov exposes the critique of capitalism put forward by the currently fashionable Byung-Chul Han. According to Davydov, Han's critique of capitalism may come into conflict with the interests of the victims of the decline of traditional capitalism. Just how well-founded this critique is, dear readers, is for you to judge. Filipp Fomichev and Egor Smirnov bring together two philosophical traditions in the field of conservative thought – Russian and German. The interpretation of Russian philosophical classics by G.-K. Kaltenbrunner may be of particular interest to a broad range of specialists. As is clear from the title of the article, the authors focus on that part of Kaltenbrunner's interpretation of Russian philosophy which deals with the religious-philosophical legacy of K.N. Leontiev.

From the history of social and political philosophy, we smoothly move to a section on the history of philosophy, represented by three articles. The section opens with Alexandr Perepletkin, also a postgraduate student at the School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, HSE University. His material is devoted to Schelling's interpretation of the transcendental analytic – the core of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. To put the essence of the text briefly, according to the author, Schelling creatively developed the categories formulated by Kant. Ilya Timofeev attempts a critical re-evaluation of Martin Heidegger's concept of “being-toward-death” in the context of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of it. Whether this attempt proves successful can only be discovered by reading the text. And finally, Russian thought. Nikita Pereverzev turns to the early philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, examining the concepts of “myth” and “religion” as key coordinates of his idea of the religious process.

In the “Epistemology and Ontology” section, we have two articles. Danil Melnikov is responsible for ontology. He has written on the problem of the incompatibility of phenomenal consciousness with a naturalistic ontology. Mikhail Khort's article is epistemological. He investigates the problem of doxastic control in the context of epistemic normativity, with an emphasis on the contradiction between voluntarism and involuntarism regarding beliefs. In this issue, we have a new feature – a section of philosophical essays, featuring a piece by German Melikhov. Through reflections based on various sources, the author arrives at the conclusion that philosophizing should be understood not as the production of theories, but as a practice capable of expanding the boundaries of a person's world through the transformation of their subjective position.

In the “Translations and Critical Editions” section, we have translations of “The Acts of the Cortes Accords in Madrid,” prepared and edited by historian Maksim Likhachev. In the reviews section, there is a response by Evgeny Blinov to the Russian translation of a book by Yuk Hui, who has been described in one domestic publication as “soon-to-be Byung-Chul Han.” Konstantin Arshin reviews Eric Storm's latest book on the history of nationalism from its origins to the present day. In the same section, there is also a review of a book by Stacey Abbott, which offers a socio-political reading of the film Near Dark.

Have a wonderful summer, dear readers! Or at least what’s left of it...

Alexander Pavlov