Dear colleagues!

We are pleased to present the 4th issue of the 9th volume of “Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics.” This special issue continues and expands the interdisciplinary dialogue initiated at the international discussion “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Enhance the Responsible Research and Innovation Framework” hosted by the School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies in March 2025. The event highlighted how the rapid development of AI challenges the RRI frameworks, and demonstrated that the ethics of technology requires more political philosophy. The contributions address new forms of responsibility, regimes of technocratic rationality, and the need for context-sensitive, politically grounded, and culturally plural approaches to responsible innovation in a multipolar world.

The article by Alexander Mikhailovsky and Elena Seredkina rethinks RI/RRI and AI ethics under conditions of a multipolar world, demonstrating the limits of their universalist claims. Drawing on the cases of China and Russia, the authors show that responsibility in the field of AI is shaped within different socio-cultural and political contexts. As an alternative, they propose the concept of a multipolar architecture of responsibility (MAR), oriented toward normative pluralism and dialogue between models of technological governance. The article by Dazhou Wang (China) substantiates the transition from engineering ethics, focused on individual moral judgment, to ethical engineering as a new discipline that embeds ethical principles into technological systems and governance processes. AI is examined simultaneously as an object of regulation and as a tool of ethical governance, enabling the operationalization of values and supporting proactive, scalable, and reflexive governance of emerging technologies. Armin Grunwald (Germany) demonstrates that digitalization and AI pose risks of gradual societal disruptions, including the erosion of freedom, responsibility, cognitive skills, and visions of the future. Grunwald argues for a reorientation of RI and technology assessment toward the early detection of such slow yet potentially destructive processes. Daria Bylieva and Alfred Nordmann (Germany) examine how AI undermines the conceptual foundations of RRI by acting as an “ontolytic” force — dissolving and reconstituting core categories like agency, authorship, and accountability that RRI traditionally seeks to govern. Elena Trufanova discusses trustworthiness and responsibility as the key issues of the AI application and concludes that they cannot be delegated to artificial systems. While Peng Cheng and Zhihui Zhang (China) reframe responsibility from a phenomenological perspective — outlining governance mechanisms for Embodied AI — Elizaveta Karpova, finally, argues for a framework of distributed moral responsibility, which appears to better capture the hybrid and networked character of contemporary human-machine decision-making. 

The “Practical Philosophy” section opens with an article by Andrey Shishkov describing the history of the development of object-oriented ontology and asserting its enduring legacy as a distinct and influential school of thought within post-continental philosophy. To learn about what “epistemic injustice” is, you can read the paper by Ekaterina Alekseeva. Through a study of medical contexts, it is demonstrated that overcoming epistemic injustice requires not only ethical correction of individual biases but also a more radical transformation of knowledge institutions to integrate diverse perspectives including “profane” knowledge. The reduction of knowledge to expert knowledge is not just an injustice; in the author’s view, it is an epistemic misery that leads to a distorted picture of the world. The third paper in the section, Andrei Kravtsov’s investigation of the cultural transfer as a complex process of semiotic adaptation focuses on the Meiji era (1868–1912) Japanese translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In his compelling study, Kravtsov examines how the Christian-existential themes of the source text undergo transformation through the lens of Buddhist-Confucian syncretism.

The “Publications and Translations” section features a conversation with Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), a Cyprus-born Australian performance artist known for radically merging the biological body with technology. In his introduction to this exclusive 2024 interview, Oleg Gurov analyzes his artistic practice and demonstrates how it challenges our fundamental assumptions about human identity and consciousness in an increasingly technological world.

The issue closes with a review by José Verissimo Teixeira da Mata (Brazil) of the second Russian edition of N.A. Vasiliev’s Imaginary Logic (2025), which sheds light on the international impact of his work on non-classical logics.

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Alexander V. Mikhailovsky and Elena V. Seredkina