The purpose of this article is to identify how modern Russia can build good relationships between multiple Russian religions and the state. At present there are many obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal. The article includes a great many statistics, and discusses political, social, and religious views of the issue.The working Russian Constitution provides major legal provisions for democratic relationships between religions and the state. The law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” (1997) clarified constitutional provisions. It should not forgotten that Russia is a secular state claiming to respect all religions. No doubt the supremacy of Orthodoxy in Russia after 1721 and the extreme atheism that arose in the Soviet Union after 1917 influenced people’s minds greatly. While the countries in Western Europe were moving from religiosity to secularism, Russia was developing the other way around. But while respecting all religions, Russia should not forget to be mindful of extremism. Religious associations themselves are likewise uneasy about the danger presented by certain mystic, neo-pagan, and destructive sects. The author argues that the best compromise between religions and the modern Russian state canonly be achieved on the basis of equality and freedom.

The aim of our paper is to present the ways in which cognitive linguistics has contributed to various developments in the domain of comics studies. After providing introductory remarks, the paper describes the main views found within the works of authors considered to be the precursors of contemporary comics studies, Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, with the intention of providing the basics that will facilitate the reader’s understanding of the present issues. The main section of the paper contains the basic tenets of cognitive semantics, including the ideas traced in the works of the authors who have observed various types of comics from the cognitivist viewpoint. This section of the paper presents the research conducted thus far by a number of scientists who have engaged indrawing parallels between cognitivist theories and comics studies, including work on visual and multimodal metaphor and metonymy and the visual language of comics. This is followed by concluding remarks that end the paper.

This paper outlines a relational variety of the theory of emergence and claims that it can be applied more fruitfully to sociology than the functional variety advocated by Keith Sawyer. Sawyer argues that the wildly disjunctive multiple realizability of social properties justifies a nonreductive approach to causal explanation in the social sciences (but also ontological individualism). In response, this paper argues, first, that the social properties he discusses are not wildly disjunctive, and secondly, that we can explain their causal significance more effectively with a relational emergence theory linked to the critical realist account of causal powers. Although these properties are multiply realizable, they are not emergent because they are multiply realizable, but despite being so.

After presenting four basic ontological frameworks for social being, the paper adopts the two-layered approach defended by Bhaskar and Poli. Within this framework, the relation between emergents and latents is briefly described. Since most emergents are ephemeral (weak signals), the problem arises of what may eventually stabilize emergents, and values are seen as promising stabilizers for emerging new behaviors. By exploiting the case of technological innovation, the paper raises the broader issue of social innovation and the problem of its stabilization.

Searle’s social ontology is criticized on two grounds: (1) that Searle’s arguments do not adequately support his commitment to logically and conceptually irreducible collective-to-individual intentionality, and (2) his formulation of the constitutive rule of collective intentionality conferring symbolic social status on intended objects does not express the required concept as clearly, unequivocally, or economically as available alternatives. Two corresponding positive recommendations are offered in response to both criticisms for developing a conservatively improved neo-Searlean philosophy of social phenomena,practices and institutions.

John Searle's Making the Social World addresses a question that is as central to philosophy in general as it is to Social Ontology. It concerns the involvement of human beings in the creation of seemingly objective facts. The facts in which Searle is interested are ‘institutional’ facts. Such facts are objective; they are also, Searle argues, ‘created by human subjective attitudes’. It is my contention that this apparent paradox arises from a misconception of 'subjective' and 'objective'. For Searle, these terms are synonymous with 'mind-dependent' and 'mindindependent'. Following the scientist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, I argue that 'objectivity' is better understood as 'theoretical' and therefore worthy of universal recognition by rational agents. Being a matter of reason, objectivity contrasts, not with mind-dependence, but immediate experience. It follows that Searle's paradox is a function of the contradictory terms in which it is stated.

This article presents theories of group belief with a problem. It is conceptually and psychologically impossible for there to be a believer with just one belief. Forconceptual reasons, a single belief could not have any content without the background of other beliefs. Or even if it could, it would for psychological reasons be impossible for the believer to know or understand the content of its sole belief. With certain plausible assumptions, however, groups would at some point of time have to have only one belief. (The assumption of discontinuity between the group’s and its members’ commitments leads to this.) If it is conceptually or psychologically impossible for the group to acquire its first belief, it can never come to acquire any beliefs at all. The article ends by discussingvarious ways out of this dilemma.

This article comparatively explores Searle’s conception of society, which prioritizes language and intentionality in producing social things and Max Weber’s conception of social action as human behavior, in which the acting individual attributes subjective meaning to his or her behavior by orientation to the behavior of others. My aim is to show that the “nonlinguistic institutional facts” which in Searle’s terms seem to emerge in the absence of any constitutive rule linguistically expressed can be described in Weber’s terms of attaching a subjective meaning to individual behavior. In this way, we may add a minimal sociology to Searle’s conceptual apparatus in order to grasp contingent and historical dimensions of the functioning of institutions.

The author tries to prove that Plato’s theory of thecreation of kosmos by Demiourgos as conforming to a pre-existing model – namely “ho LÍgos” – by way of thepossession of a peculiar art, i.e. “to-know-how”, has a contemporary correspondent in the image built by science of the universe. Even the emergence of evil in such a rational and ordered universe has a replication in the religious myth of Lucifer’s rebellion.The paper is intended to show that, in the history of post-modern culture, three periods of global life are known as characterized through the connection betweenscience, philosophy and religion.The first is described in the dialogue Timaeus, where Plato imagined the creation of the world by Demiourgos, according to the Logos: “Cosmos was forged by a model – Logos – which can be designed with reason – Nous”; “Once he saw that the universe is moving and living, born as holy habitation of the immortal gods, begotten of the Father who was seized by delight and rejoicing. He had thought about how to make it even more like the model – Logos. And how this model – Logos – is an eternal creature, Demiourgos tried to perfect the universe, in this regard also”; “He has made a smooth body, uniform and equal everywhere from centre, whole and absolutely right-down, composed of perfect bodies”. Ptolemy, drawing on an Aristotelian conception of time and eternity, developed, in his Almagest, a vision of the cosmos founded on the ideas of Aristotle’s Physics describing a geocentric universe full of symbols. But this universe could not be brought to the eye as improved, as a universal astronomical system limited by the firmament of the fixed stars beyond which Christian theology has placed Paradise and Hell.The second period can be described through what Max Weber says about modernity, a process of “Entzauberung der Welt”, dramatically accelerated sincethe scientific revolution of Galileo, accomplished by the globalization of the mechanistic empire, by replacing Aristotelian and Thomist space, which is closed, limited and heterogeneous, by a homogeneous infinite space. Meta-science that favoured the emergence of modern scientific revolution is related to the logos problem of evolution and its solutions, where the core terminology means equally reason, rationality, science, and at the same time speech, word, verb, having religious or transcendent connotations but secularised in an historical horizon.The contemporary period – the third, the end of the second and the beginning of the third millennium – is placed under the heresy of the solidarity between science and technology, characterized by the technefication of science designating a process whereby techniques are predominant in traditional research methods, opening an age of cybernetic heresy.

Throughout the history of philosophical thinking, ethics has almost never been associated with ontology because the moral approach is about the action while the ontological approach is about the being. The prospective approach confers to moral philosophy a genuine ontological direction, an ontology of the human, since it aims at identifying the problems of (human) existence, which no longer describes “what should be” but mostly “what can be”, thus anticipating the ways of human existence in a future world.The challenges raised by disruptive innovations and the environmental issue require the critical eye of moral philosophy regarding the impact of technological progress is having in redefining the human condition of tomorrow’s society; all the more so as we are facing a regrettable backwardness of moral progress, which does not seem to keep pace with the spectacular changes in science and technology. The wisdom of ethical reflection refers to a feeling of concern for both present and future humanity as a whole,relating not only to immediate reality but, especially, anticipating what might happen.

We consider that the epistemological recourse to semiotic dimensions could lead to peace: those in favour of an epistemology without a knowing subject are right (if they keep themselves within the syntactic and semantic frames of theoretical construction) and those who add a knowing subject are also right (if they want to express the concrete process of building up scientific convictions).

Any logical analysis – and therefore philosophy itself – begins with the question: is there an indubitable knowledge? To answer this question Bertrand Russellappeals to tradition – both mathematical and philosophical – in which he recognizes himself. The process used by Russell, in order to build mathematics on a new foundation, was to build concepts logically, starting from atomic elements and known relationships. For example, a logical construction as that of the “class” is that a sentence, which includes a fixed concept, is turned into a logically equivalent statement (example analyzed by Russell is “Scott” and “the author of Waverley”) which unlike the first, entails relations that include concepts. Thus, the primitive concept can be replaced and removed. The new method was named the “theory of types” and became the intellectual program of Russell and his successors. Among the method’s performances is solving logical and mathematical paradoxes. The importance of Russell’s logical investigations exceeded the reductionist program, stimulating the formalist program of philosophy andmethodology and the logical analysis of the language of science with a logical-mathematical apparatus. This program was definitively concluded, it seems, by Kurt Gödel’s results on the decidability problem in the formal axiomatic systems of P type, a problem closely linked to the question of “truth” and the two other meta-theoretical properties of P formal systems, namely “consistency” and “completeness”. Gödel’s Theorems do not affect the now established legitimacy of a meta-theoretical system concerning the formalizing processes, but prove that the hilbertian original program to reduce mathematics to logic is old and the very meaning of the whole process of realizing it must be analyzed again. Considering that in a formal P system, the decision process is demonstrability of true statements, Gödel’s research findings prove the consubstantial relationship of the four meta-theoretical properties Truth-Consistency-Completeness-Demonstrability.

On the assumption that, among forms of human communication, artistic communication is one of the most rich and complex, this paper mainly analyses two major aspects. The first refers to the phenomenon of contemporary art characterized by its reflective, but also commercial, nature, by its questioning of the essence, the forms of expression and the purpose of art, which seeks its identity with respect to the requirements of our time. The second brings into focus another major issue: the current strained relations between contemporary artistic creation and the public, each with its own development and justifications that are not easy to reconcile. Finally, this study advocates the idea that, beyond any indulgence to "anti-aesthetic", post-historical artistic creation, the public claims that art should offer aesthetic satisfaction, for she seeks beauty in artistic creation, to the delight of contemplation and spiritual perfection.

In this article I discuss and evaluate the selectivity problem as a problem put forward by Bermúdez (1997, 2000) against anti-intentionalist accounts of self-deception. I argue that the selectivity problem can be raised even against intentionalist accounts, which reveals the too demanding constraint that the problem puts on the adequacy of a psychological explanation of action. Finally I try to accommodate the intuitions that support the cogency of the selectivity problem using the resources from the framework provided by an anti-intentionalist account of self-deception.