The article explores the hypothesis of a metaphysical nature of order as a fundamental premise that determines the basic principles of ordering reality and its content. Since the traditional idea of order is formed within the boundaries of classical logic, this study analyzes the axiomatic foundations underlying its conceptualization, as well as their representation in intuitionistic, paraconsistent, and modal approaches. The study raises the question of the possibility of using non-classical logic as a method of radically rethinking, or even deeply denying, the established understanding of order. However, it is illustrated that, despite the significant differences between these logical systems, the key principles of ordering and thinking remain unchanged. Thus, the author puts forward and systematizes a set of theses regarding the existence of immutable foundations of order – first as metaphysical, and subsequently as an ontological constant that determines any possible reality. Order appears not as a derivative, but as a primary condition of reality, language, and thinking, and therefore the very essence of cognition, being, and existence as such is limited by the inevitable nature of order. Therefore, attempts to go beyond the classical logical laws do not lead to the need to revise the very foundations of order, but, on the contrary, only confirm their all-encompassing permanence.
This article provides a socio-philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of women’s freedom through the prism of sacred discourse and socio-cultural practices. It explores the ambivalent nature of religious tradition, which acts both as an instrument of normative restriction (control over physicality, reproduction, hierarchical subordination) and a legitimate resource for the realization of female subjectivity. The author examines the transformation of methods of regulating female behavior from radical forms of patriarchal violence and harsh biopolitics in African communities to “soft” ideological constructs. Particular attention is paid to the paradoxes of emancipation, where a return to sacred meanings and their intellectual reinterpretation become the basis for women to acquire moral authority and public leadership (particularly in Eastern spiritual practices). Based on an interdisciplinary approach, it is proven that female identity is formed in a complex interaction between the collective mentality of the community and the individual’s desire for autonomy. Female freedom is not a direct consequence of rejecting tradition or being included in it, but arises from the interaction between personal choice and the sacred order. The author emphasizes the ambivalent nature of sacred discourse: it simultaneously serves as a mechanism of restriction and a resource for self-realization, opening up new perspectives for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophy, gender studies, religious studies and cultural studies.
This study proffers a radical re-evaluation of the Chinese Buddhist iconometric tradition, positing it not merely as a repository of artistic technicalities but as a sophisticated technology of ontological control and soteriological engineering specifically applied to sacred sculpture. Spanning a millennium – from the proto- Tantric heterogeneity of the early Tang dynasty (Tuoluoni ji jing) to the rigid imperial orthopraxy of the Qing (Zaoxiang liangdu jing) – the research interrogates the dialectical tension between the textual “legislating” of the sacred body and the sculptural “instantiating” of the divine presence. By deploying a methodology that synthesizes philological rigor with material culture studies (specifically the codicology of Dunhuang manuscripts P.4514, P.2002, and S.2498), the article argues that the trajectory of Chinese religious statuary demonstrates a fundamental epistemic shift: from the haptic transmission of charisma via the fenben (powder pounce) in medieval workshops to the optic discipline of the grid via the woodblock print in imperial ateliers. Furthermore, the study incorporates a historiographical critique of Western reception and a technical analysis of bronze casting, demonstrating how “lost-wax” metallurgy functioned as the material proving ground for iconometric theory. The investigation exposes how the Qing court utilized the Zaoxiang liangdu jing (1742) to bureaucratize the volumetric body of the Buddha, turning sculpture into a site of political governance. Ultimately, this work reconstructs the “operating system” of the Chinese sacred image, demonstrating that iconometry serves as the nexus where theology, technology, and the material plasticity of the divine converge.
This article was written in 2004, but it was not made public. Nevertheless, in many respects, the core assessments and ideas presented therein have not lost their significance, in the author’s view, even though they constitute a certain “philosophical archive” that is of interest both for evaluating the situation of philosophy teaching in Ukraine and for the project of its improvement. This article breaks down the situation which described as a certain confusion among philosophy instructors following the abolition of Soviet-style centralized curricula. This led to various attempts to replace obsolete teaching standards, which, nonetheless, largely retained the old course content, eventually resulting in a return to centralized ministerial programs. We became aged, but little has changed over time. Common to all philosophy course curricula remained, as before, their unproblematic nature, fragmentariness, lack of system, ahistoricism, and absence of conceptual integrity, as well as the neglect of the national specificity of the Ukrainian type of philosophizing. To address these shortcomings, the article proposes a university course framework based on the fundamental worldview principles of the Kyiv School of Philosophy, centred around the key concepts of “human” and “world”. This approach is grounded in the author’s concept of “categories of ultimate bases” as cultural universals, replacing the abstractly conceived human being with a human who exists within the world and experiences existential boundary situations.
The article provides a socio-philosophical analysis of the development of the “economic” man through the prism of the contexts of his historical development. It analyses changes in the role of the economic man and his influence on socio-economic relations in society and considers the contemporary features inherent in the economic man today. It shows how the role of economic man has changed from an economic egoist who is concerned only with his own problems (A. Smith’s research) to the modern role, when economic man achieves the development of his entrepreneurial abilities, becomes a partial owner of the means of production, and actually becomes an employee – operator of a computer program that controls the production process and is a socially adapted subject, since the achievement of work results usually occurs in a collective where the subjects of economic life are interdependent on each other. It is concluded that the economic man of today is a combination of economic needs, interests, and goals of an individual, an organic combination of the traits of an employee and an owner.
The article analyzes certain aspects of the image of Pontius Pilate and the development of the Christian tradition based on the story by Anatole France “Procurator of Judea”, the film by Gian Paolo Calegari and Irving Rapper “Pontius Pilate”. Consideration of this topic is carried out by analyzing the chapter of one of the parts of the study by the British historian A. J. Toynbee “Comprehension of History” entitled “The History and Prospects of Jewry”. The authors of the article approach the presentation of the Christian tradition in a critical manner. It is stated, based on the involvement of works by representatives of German historiography of the early 20th century, that the formation of the Christian tradition contradicted the main cosmopolitan aspects of ancient civilization, which have progressive historical significance. At the same time, the imperial discourse dictated, as is known, that Ancient Rome first fought against representatives of Christianity, and then included them in administrative imperial practices. These practices had a different external expression compared to the subsequent historical fate of Christianity. Based on the methodological developments of J. Burckhardt, attempts to revive the social positions of early modern Christianity are critically assessed. As an illustrative model of the correctness of this approach, we use the thesis of A. Toynbee, who skeptically assessed the historical path of Israel in the 20th century. Burckhardt’s and Toynbee’s assessments of Christianity partially overlap, but only in the most general form. It is stated that turning to the Toynbean system of methodological coordinates allows us to see the fair nature of A. Toynbee’s assessment of the “fate of the Jews”. The British historian drew attention to the negative nature of the attempt to put into practice the Christian (Jewish) tradition to justify the isolated behavior of Israel (Zionism). This leads to the abandonment of the “universal mission”. As a general conclusion of the presented article, a thesis is put forward according to which one of the few progressive achievements of the Christian tradition is its ability to achieve significant historical results at the moments “when History comes into motion” (A. Toynbee). In general, such moments rather reflect a situation of a full-scale historical crisis (J. Burckhardt), from which this or that society cannot independently emerge. Therefore, a critical view of Christianity has grounds for existence, in the sense of the ultimate “victory” of Pontius Pilate (cosmopolitanism) over exclusivist tendencies in Christianity.
The article provides a socio-philosophical analysis of the shadow economy as a social institution based on the concept developed by Hernando de Soto. It substantiates the thesis that the shadow economy cannot be reduced to a purely criminal or deviant phenomenon; rather, it represents a form of mass social self-organization and a rational societal response to state institutional inefficiency, excessive regulation, and limited access to legal economic mechanisms. The study demonstrates that the shadow sector performs compensatory, adaptive, and integrative functions by meeting the basic needs of households, sustaining economic liquidity, and reducing social tensions under conditions of institutional crisis. Particular attention is paid to the ontological and normative status of the shadow economy as a space for the formation of informal norms, customary law, and alternative models for legitimizing property and labor. Based on a historical-comparative analysis of the experiences of England, the United States, and Latin American countries, the article shows that, under certain conditions, the legalization of shadow practices can serve as a resource for institutional evolution and sustainable economic development. In the Ukrainian context, the shadow economy is interpreted as an ambivalent phenomenon that combines both risks and the potential for socio-economic stabilization. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to rethink the role of the state and the limits of legal regulation in light of the capacities of social self-organization.
The article analyses epistemic values in medicine that determine its conceptual and methodological foundations. It shows that medicine is not limited to the sphere of therapeutic practice but functions as a complex institutional system in which social, cultural, and scientific factors interact. The distinction between social and epistemic values is defined: the former set the target orientations of research, while the latter regulate the criteria of scientific validity and reliability of knowledge. Four types of epistemic value-laden commitments (phenomena, inferences, theoretical virtues, and standards of accuracy) are examined through the lens of medical knowledge. It is concluded that epistemic values constitute the core of medicine as a science, determining its research strategies and theoretical trajectories.
The article provides a socio-philosophical analysis of the woman phenomenon in traditional societies and the metamodern era. The transformation of ideas about a woman as a socio-cultural value and a subject of freedom in the context of globalization processes, changes in gender roles and rethinking of traditional norms is considered. Special attention is paid to the categories of freedom, identity and social responsibility as key components of the woman phenomenon in modern society. The thesis is substantiated that the modern woman appears not only as an object of social changes, but also as an active creator of new value orientations. The relevance of the study of the phenomenon of women in modern social philosophy is due to deep sociocultural transformations, rethinking of gender identity and corporeality in the metamodern era. It is necessary for understanding the change in the subjectivity of women, new axiological guidelines and solving ethical challenges associated with social and technological virtualization. The purpose of our article is a socio-philosophical study of the phenomenon of women through the dimension of freedom and values. The socio-philosophical phenomenon of women encompasses her rethinking as an active subject of history and culture, overcoming patriarchal stereotypes and biological determinism. Women actively realize themselves in politics, the public sector, the volunteer movement, the educational, cultural and economic spheres, as well as in the security and defense sector. The conditions of the metamodern era and wartime have actualized new forms of responsibility and leadership, which indicates a qualitative rethinking of the role of women in society. Therefore, the phenomenon of women in modern times should be considered as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon, the basis of which is the affirmation of freedom as a fundamental value. The prospects for further research are associated with an in-depth analysis of the interaction of gender policy, cultural transformations and the formation of new models of female identity in the context of global and national challenges.
The study addresses the philosophical comprehension of time as an aesthetic category in contemporary Ukrainian visual art. It examines the practices of four prominent artists – Vlada Ralko, Mykyta Kadan, Alevtyna Kakhidze, and Tiberiy Silvashi – to reveal how different temporal models emerge in artistic strategies: rupture, deceleration, layering, chronotope, and duration. In Ralko’s works, time appears as a nervous fracture and bodily fragmentation; in Markov’s theatre projects, as a strategy of aesthetic deceleration; in Kadan’s installations, as archival superimposition of historical layers; in Kakhidze’s diaristic drawings, as the chronotope of everyday life embedded in wartime experience; in Silvashi’s abstract painting, as a structural property of colour and form. The theoretical framework combines classical philosophical approaches (H. Bergson, P. Ricœur, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida) with insights from contemporary Ukrainian researchers (L. Smyrna, V. Burlaka, O. Kotkova, O. Soloviov), who address temporality in art through cultural memory, post-memory, and the political dimension of time. The conclusion emphasises that Ukrainian visual art not only reflects altered temporal experiences shaped by war and social transformations but also actively constructs new temporal models that merge local sensitivity with global relevance.
The article examines the phenomenon of the disintegration of traditional collective narratives under the influence of algorithmically controlled social platforms. The mechanisms of personalization, emotional credibility and fragmentation of the information space are analyzed. The thesis about the civilizational character of this transformation is substantiated and possible ways of restoring common meanings are outlined. Algorithms are argued to act as new actors in meaning production, replacing universal interpretive frameworks with individualized “filter bubbles” and ephemeral viral micronarratives. Particular attention is paid to the paradoxical nature of algorithmic platforms: while destroying traditional national, civic and ethical narratives, they simultaneously generate new forms of digital collective (trends, memes, viral campaigns), characterized by extreme speed, but minimal depth and durability. The political and ethical dimensions of the opacity of algorithms are discussed, as well as the risks of manipulation and hybrid information warfare. The article concludes that the collapse of collective narratives is not just a technological but a profound civilizational shift that requires conscious efforts in education, culture, and public policy to reconstruct spaces for complex, long-term meanings in the age of algorithms.
The term “picture” implies the distancing of the subject from the world and an objective view of it. Despite the desire for objectivity, a picture of the world captures what a person considers important, main, essential, and not just an exact copy of the original. This is due to the metanarratives that underlie it. In particular, they represent a system of values that can be deployed by a set of narratives, where the metanarrative plays a decisive role. Metanarratives are integral to a picture of the world, since one of the elements of any picture of the world is the history or evolution (or creation) of the world and its fragments in general. Narratives are also present in other structural components of picture of the world, as they involve a description or some kind of narrative, with value statements, which are usually folded narratives. Metanarratives are often embodied in strategic narratives. Strategic narratives can be divided into two types. The first one focuses on universal interests and values: human rights and freedoms, democratic ideals, the principle of humanism, including the right to peace. The second is focused on narrow state interests that contradict the interests of civilized states and universal values. It requires a special ideology to justify it, pseudo-historical metanarratives permeated with modern myths. These include Russian strategic narratives that are well aligned with metanarratives and propaganda narratives and have deep cultural and historical roots. They set the modern rashism picture of the world that unites the ruling circles and the majority of the population. They are strategic for imperial Russian statehood, especially for the current political regime in Russia. Among them: 1) Russia is a bastion of true spirituality, supported by mythologized religious, Marxist, and tsarist references; 2) a narrative of allegedly great Russian culture, which is fed by inadequate great-power educational programs 3) the narrative of Russia’s special historical path, which uses a mixture of historical truth and mythology, historical revisionism and scientific research, and creates a distorted, biased, falsified historical memory with special features of great power. Russian great-power strategic narratives set a modern rashism picture of the world that contradicts universal values and scientific and civilizational ideals, determines hostility and misunderstanding, which requires a change in marginal uncivilized regimes.
The article examines cultural decolonization in Ukraine as a multi-level semantic process in which discursive, practical, and symbolic dimensions of cultural action interact. It develops a typology of semantic scenarios (normative-state, intellectual-humanitarian, communicative-popular) and analyzes their functions and consequences at the symbolic, socio-cultural, and epistemic levels. The study demonstrates that decolonization operates through an inversion logic, in which liberation from colonial structures is combined with the risk of their symbolic reproduction, thus highlighting the need for a transition toward reflexive cultural thinking.
This article is a shortened and revised presentation of three lectures on the ontology of Platonic Ideas delivered within the Erasmus+ program at the University of Siena. The author proposes a hierarchical model of the ontology of Platonic Ideas, according to which Ideas possess different ontological statuses depending on their position within the hierarchy. This hierarchy is grounded in the “great kinds” of Plato’s philosophy but is generally oriented by the criterion of the one and the many. As the level increases, entities are unified and reduced, ultimately culminating in the One, which may simultaneously be regarded as undivided Being, the Good, Beauty, Truth, and so forth. At the opposite end of this pyramid-like structure lies an infinite (or very large) multiplicity of individual elements (points, lines, sounds, etc.). Ideas appear as principles that organize chaotic multiplicity into ordered unities, and the level of organization determines the ontological level of an Idea. The principles of organization include other elements of Plato’s philosophy, such as eros, dialectics, recollection, and so on. The author also examines the reasons behind Plato’s development of the theory of Ideas and offers a general characterization of this theory.
The article provides a comprehensive academic inquiry into the thanatological discourse within Arab-Muslim culture, positioning it as a sophisticated socio-cultural, religious, and philosophical phenomenon. The authors meticulously trace the conceptual evolution of death, marking the profound transition from pre-Islamic fatalistic perceptions of time as a destructive force to the Koranic paradigm of death as a divinely ordained trial and eschatological threshold. A significant portion of the study is dedicated to the ontological exploration of the liminal state known as “Barzakh”, functioning as a metaphysical bridge between earthly existence and the afterlife. Furthermore, the research delves into Sufi metaphysics, specifically the concept of «dying before death», interpreted not as biological cessation but as the spiritual annihilation of the ego in pursuit of divine union. By examining the impact of these thanatological dogmas on the formation of ethical frameworks, funeral rites, and the visual aesthetics of Islamic necropolises, the paper illustrates how death serves as a primary regulator of social and moral life. The study concludes that deciphering the Islamic model of death is essential for deconstructing contemporary cultural stereotypes, countering the politicization of martyrdom, and fostering a genuine trans-civilizational dialogue in an increasingly globalized world.
The study clarifies the concept of grounding. Metaphysical grounding is characterized as an explanation of constitutive relationships among facts (as well as entities, beings, substances, and other objects of metaphysical inquiry). It is distinct from causation, supervenience, logical entailment, and computability. Grounding functions as a metaphysical operation that explicates how a given fact (entity, being, substance, and another object of metaphysical inquiry) is constituted by other facts (entities, beings, substances, and other objects of metaphysical inquiry). These grounding facts (entities, beings, substances, and other objects of metaphysical inquiry ) must include recognition of the existence of the relevant fact (entity, being, substance, or other object under consideration). Proper grounding, therefore, requires a complete account of all facts that determine the given fact. When this condition is not satisfied, the relation should be described not as grounding but as quasi-grounding.
The most important common themes in the poetry of goliards and Ukrainian wandering clergy are examined. Goliards is a collective name for free students and clerics who traveled throughout Europe in the 12th–13th centuries in search of a better place to study, or even wandered from university to university after losing their parents’ support. They had a good time, mostly in taverns, and were proud of their freedom, natural lifestyle, and independent relationships. They sang about dice games, drinking wine, natural desires for fun and love, romance, and female beauty. They criticized the clergy, knowing its flaws from the inside, and especially harshly denounced the crimes of simony — the trading of positions, the sale of career positions by church dignitaries and even representatives of the higher administration of the Catholic Church in Rome. Their songs were written in Latin, some in the German of the time, and were filled with stories from ancient history and images of real heroes and ancient philosophers. The creativity of Ukrainian traveling clergy flourished in the 17th–18th centuries, when the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy appeared in Ukraine, teaching subjects in Latin, similar to European universities. Wandering clergy, largely imitating the poetry and lifestyle of goliards, wrote in their native language for their contemporaries. Their work is filled with motifs of the difficult life of students who suffered from cold and hunger. The wandering clerks traveled mainly through villages, performing their poems before peasants on the occasion of major holidays — Christmas and Easter, so the themes of their work are close to the real conditions of peasant life. There are no names of ancient philosophers here, but biblical characters prevail, equated with Ukrainian peasants, even women, who feast with them on holidays, even flirt and sing Ukrainian songs. The work of wandering clerics, which was close to the reality of the time, was intended not so much to move listeners as to beg for alms and generous gifts. The poetry of goliards and traveling clerks is particularly similar in its criticism of church dignitaries and monks, their greed, and their tendency toward gluttony and drunkenness.
The study shows that the topology of space in Democritus’ philosophy reflects the peculiarities of his inner world and deviant behavior. Democritus’ emptiness has continuity, which indicates a desire to control desires, but its “sparseness” with atoms symbolizes the difficulty of experiencing frustration and a tendency toward impulsive actions. As a space without extension, emptiness indicates the philosopher’s impulsiveness and his intolerance for delayed gratification. As a space without structure, it expresses Democritus’ narcissistic nature – grandiosity, devaluation of others and himself. Self-blindness becomes the result of an internal conflict between shame and narcissistic rage. The multidimensionality and infinity of space symbolize the multiplicity of directions of narcissism and the inability to achieve a stable identity: the philosopher’s personality remains in constant division and self-decomposition. Thus, the topology of Democritus’ space reveals not only his cosmology, but also his psychological structure – the dynamics of frustration, narcissism, and inner division.
The article analyzes the changes that have occurred in the philosophical-aesthetic and artistic understanding of the ugly over the past hundred years. It is shown that an adequate understanding of the ugly is possible only if the aesthetic experience is understood as an aesthetic way of being, in the context of such concepts as being, non-being, chaos, cosmos, structure, etc. That is, an adequate understanding of the ugly involves its understanding through the definition of negative existential entities and states. It is this approach that brings us closer to understanding the essence of the negative-aesthetic, while other ways of seeing it allow us to consider only the phenomenal level. The work examined the essence of the basic categories of aesthetics – the beautiful and the ugly – through the lens of the specifics of human existence. The basis of ideas about the aesthetically negative is mythologemes associated with chaos, non-being and unstable being. It is shown that through the finite ugly image, an infinitely chaotic, imageless, alien – negatively unstable being is represented to a person. The feeling of aversion that arises when perceiving the ugly is based on the experience of a negative mode of being and ultimately is an aesthetic rejection of non-being. The ugly is considered in the context of the archetypal-mythological, phenomenological and socio-cultural layers of understanding. It is this context that provides an opportunity to explain the “paradox of the ugly” – the ability of the ugly to evoke a sense of aesthetic pleasure in the recipient. It is shown that, along with the mimetic and cognitive explanations of this paradox, the existential-psychological understanding of the attractiveness of the ugly has considerable explanatory power: the ugly as an effective means of displacing and overcoming fears that permeate human existence, and especially the fear of death. The events of modern social life, such as the Ukrainian-Russian war require a rethinking of the purely aesthetic-contemplative, detached approach to the ugly and its significant supplementation with a moral-ethical approach. It is argued that such an understanding of aesthetic phenomena should not only enable us to understand their nature more deeply, but also expand the field of reflection of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline.
The article conducts a cultural analysis of strategies for interpreting the folk image of Momotaro in anime of the 1930s–2020s. It was revealed that in anime of the 1930s–1940s, strategies of sacralization and heroization of Momotaro were used for personification of key postulates of Japanese nationalism – arahitogami (belief in the divine origin of the emperor) and kokutai (the idea of his blood connection with all subjects). It is proven that the reintegration of the image of Momotaro into a post-war Japanese culture was carried out through its desacralization, deheroization and moefication.
