The serious leisure is considered as a living environment that is important for the development of agency at different ages. In the period of growing up, young people face many challenges that require them to actively make choices in the fields of education, profession, and relationships, and their previous experience of proactive interaction with the environment plays an important role, which can be relied upon when making responsible decisions. An important environment for the trial and implementation of agency can be the sphere of serious leisure as an activity that requires effort and long-term involvement and at the same time is characterized by great freedom of action. Awareness and integration of the experience of agency in the autobiographical narrative can serve as a basis for the complication and differentiation of the motivational system of the individual and further development of self-determination. Despite the wide representation of leisure studies, the choices made by young adults in leisure activities and attitudes towards them have yet to be explored. To study the manifestations of agency in serious leisure, 24 interviews with informants from the period of growing up were collected. The conducted deductive thematic analysis showed that the manifestations of agency can be found at the stages of initiation, implementation and termination of serious leisure, where they can be presented in the form of initiative, interaction, comprehension of events and decision-making, changes and organization of activities. The analysis of autobiographical narratives shows that the environment of serious leisure is saturated and promising for manifestations of agency at different ages.
The article examines one of the concepts of a consistent theory of morality — moral luck. It occurs when a person’s moral standing is determined by factors beyond his control, or, in other words, by luck. However, all actions and their consequences are, to one degree or another, determined by such factors. In this aspect, moral luck is opposed to moral responsibility and disrupts the natural practice of human interrelationships. The problem arises: how can one be praised or blamed for certain actions or their consequences if they are partially or completely independent of his individual choice? This article is devoted to consideration of this problem. On the one hand, it argues against resultant moral luck — the kind that is associated with the results of actions. To complete this, the “control principle” and the nature of human action are analyzed. On the other hand, arguments are defended in favor of the significant importance of considering the factor of moral luck for the actualization of people’s moral behavior.
Illusionism is a relatively recent theory of consciousness that has absorbed and consistently developed physicalist intuitions about consciousness. This approach gives sufficient grounds to consider it contrary to the basic ideas of realists regarding phenomenal consciousness, because according to illusionism there is no phenomenal consciousness, it is just an illusion. The author believes that the danger of this thesis for realists depends on which concept of illusion to adhere to. After a brief review of the illusionist approach, the article presents two possible contents of the concept of the illusion of phenomenality. The author then considers whether realists cannot agree with any of them. One of the possible understandings of illusion is the conceptual distortion of the data of experience or introspection in the course of their interpretation. Although this view is not basic for illusionists, it is implicitly and sometimes explicitly contained in their examples and arguments. In this case, realists can agree that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not only without weakening their position, but also emphasizing the special status of phenomenality, which allows a person to expand reality when faced with what is not in the world. When an illusion is understood as a distortion by introspection itself, before any conceptual reactions to its data, the position of illusionists turns out to be much more dangerous for phenomenal consciousness. However, even in this case, realists can introduce a number of counterarguments to which illusionism does not yet have answers acceptable to both sides. Although this discussion is complicated by ambiguities in the relation of definitions of key terms of representatives of these two approaches, which complicates its analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that realism has a chance, if not to adapt the illusion, then to demonstrate the problems and gaps of the illusionist position in connection with this concept.
The article presents possible grounds for intercultural dialogue. Due to the polarization of international relations and political tensions, the issue of the fundamental possibility of grounds for intercultural dialogue in modern times is being considered. The concept of intercultural dialogue is understood in the article as an integrative process based on the acceptance of cultural differences. The author argues that the use of modern sociological approaches is not always applicable as a basis for building dialogical relations, since such approaches do not reflect the cultural characteristics of individual communities. Sociological researches are often politicized, and the methods of classifying different cultural communities used in them need to be rethought. Also, sociological approaches to the interaction of different cultural communities are focused on long-term ideological work, but the existing problems show that quick and constructive solutions are needed. According to the author, other grounds for interaction between cultures and communities are required, more general and applicable at the current stage on a global transnational scale. The author identifies two main starting points for intercultural dialogue: scientific and environmental cooperation and economic cooperation. Each of these paths has ample opportunities in the modern world for implementation in the field of the global economy or in the field of scientific cooperation and environmental protection. On the basis of transnational economic cooperation, it is possible to find an economic consensus between states which often represents different cultural systems. International scientific and environmental elaborations also serve as a basis for constructive interaction in front of common environmental problems or by qualitatively new scientific developments. The two paths presented are points for formal interaction, which can further be an entry point of an integrative cultural dialogue.
The failure of the project of socialism in the twentieth century led to what can be designated as a loss of horizon of expectations. People are increasingly focused on the present, and the future, if considered, is more as a source of fears and uncertainty, and not as an opportunity to implement human aspirations and projects. Various methods of “privatization” of their living space lead to escapism from more global social projects. Even the very idea of utopia becomes privatized as part of the current state of affairs. Thus, there is a crisis of ideas about the future, which calls into question how humanity will develop in the future. In this situation, the discourse about the future among modern leftists acquires important values for possible social changes that can be available to society. In addition, how these concepts affect the ideas about a person and his place in a socio-political system also play an important role. This article tries to reconstruct the current state of utopia in the left social and philosophical discourse. For this, an analysis of such socio-political concepts as “left melancholy”, “utopia as education of desires” and “real utopia” is carried out. The conclusion is made of varying degrees of relevance and importance of these concepts for society as a whole and a person in particular.
