Vol 2, No 3 (2022)

The article analyzes the philosophical ideas of St. Lem, expressed by him in the short story with the double title "On the Impossibility of Life" and "On the Impossibility of Prognostication". It shows that the story is based on ontological issues related to the existence status of unique future events. Lem demonstrates the features of this status through the example of a fictional story of future Professor Kouska’s birth, on whose behalf indeterministic conclusions about the nature of unique events are made. Lem's thesis that the information about future unique events objectively does not exist is one of the key conclusions. For this reason, prognosticating events of this kind is basically impossible. The lack of information is related to the fact that ontologically there is no future, it has not happened yet. This Lem’s thesis is supplemented by the author's reasoning that the past no longer ontologically exists that appears in the indeterminate traceless disappearance of a part of unique events from the past as time passes. Defense to indeterminism includes criticism of the dogmatic determinism of Parmenidean science and philosophy, that dispel time and change from being. As a result, dogmatic determinism ignores history as an ordered set of unique events. A new understanding of the possible is substantiated, unrelated to the idea of probability theory elementary events and a great number of modal logic possible worlds.

The author suggests that the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, that humanity faced in the 21st century, can be considered as a reaction of the planet Earth nature to the aggressive man-made behavior of the modern civilization. If tensions arise in the noosphere, and the law of the struggle of species for existence is the way the living sphere exists, then there must be a counteraction between the "wild" life and the "wise" life. Perhaps the sudden appearance of SARS-CoV-2, that so "skillfully" resists all the tricks of the human belonging to technogenic civilization, makes it clear to the mankind that the type of attitude to the world that was chosen by Western European civilization and assumed a global character is flawed and requires, if not a change, then at least a significant correlation.
Stanislav Lem's story "The Hunt for the Sataurus" tells about a robot that was accidentally damaged and started doing unpredictable actions that are dangerous to people's lives. A group of spaceport armed people is intent on neutralizing the damaged robot by organizing a hunt for the "crazed" robot.
The new hunt for the Sataur - the hunt for the virus of the COVID-19 pandemic - is different from the one presented in Lem's story. The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not the result of a "damage" of something but the result of such civilization development, that is based on the opposition of culture and nature. Therefore, the victory over SARS-CoV-2 requires change in the cultural framework for the civilization development.
Humanity should learn a lesson from the “hunt” for the coronavirus COVID-19 – it’s time to get serious about modifying the values of our culture and developing a new ethics that would orient its categorical imperative not to the first, but to the second person (YOU, not I, determine the rightness of the act).

The article reveals the conditions for the science fiction and fantasy fiction to affect formation of technooptimistic and technopessimistic attitude of young readers. Primarily, the work assumes the way fiction heroes understand artefacts with reservations can be considered as the basis to reveal the attitude to engineering among those generations for whom these works were notional points. Technooptimism is defined as a worldview attitude within which nature and the humanbeing cause problems. The article shows that technopessimism identifies the human activity as the problem source. Harry Potter series proved to shape technopessimistic worldview and excuse technology inequality. Through the example of T. Pratchett books the article demonstrates that literature can formalize readers’ responsible attitude towards equipment if it shows not only the threat that pose technologies (the Promethan mentality), but also remedies to manage effects of machinery use, including those resulting from improper decisions (the Epimethian mentality).

The article examines the concept of the literary work essence, theoretically developed by S. Lem in his book “The Philosophy of Chance”. It shows the principles of his criticism of the structuralism approach, and also it compares S. Lem’s theory of the work with the concepts of R. Barthes and U. Eco. The fundamental characteristic of S. Lem’s approach here is that his understanding of the work polysemy and its multiple interpretations does not contradict the existence of “best” interpretation. According to S. Lem, the basic principle of the work understanding is the investigation of its deep ontological model, that is bringing chaos to the order structure. At the same time, the order is of procedural and intersubjective nature. S. Lem adopts the “classical” principle of searching the work “best interpretation” so that it should be the result of the selection and synthesis of several variants. Furthermore, S. Lem employs the archetype of the Word creating the world, that builds up the reality. Thereby, S. Lem’s thinking continues to be determined by biblical archetypes, despite all his external scientism. Such way of thinking is still a valuable pattern for us, since it allows us to combine the analysis of the latest phenomena and situations in culture with understanding of its deep archetypical foundations.

The article considers the original versions of three stories by N.G. Garin-Mikhailovsky, published in the 1890s–1900s in two Samara periodicals – «Samarskaya Gazeta» and «Samarsky Vestnik». Comparing these variants with later editions of these stories, known from book publications, the authors of the article reconstruct the process of writing, and also try to imagine the creative laboratory of the artist. Although he «wrote on the fly», while working on each story, he moved consistently from specifics to generalization, from observation to meaning, and from emotion to an image. Thus, comparing the original and edited versions of the story «Rebekah», the authors stated a significant text reduction by the writer, who in the editing process tried to shift the main focus from the everyday aspect of the heroes' drama to the inner, spiritual one. If the original version showed the whole story of the hero's madness, the edited text focuses on key points that allow readers to complete the whole story about the «martyrs to love» themselves. The other two writer’s stories considered in the article – «Adochka» and «Genius» – were also significantly changed. While editing these stories, N.G. Garin-Mikhailovsky solved one main problem: the life truth was to become an artistic one that would speak for itself in its own language having little in common both with the specifics of real events and with attempts at rhetorical generalizations and philosophical insights.

The article states and grounds the task to develop and introduce the system of university students’ monitoring as a tool to manage education process that enables to solve the problem of lack of knowledge about the object under control. The article describes theoretical and methodological reasons for the monitoring system. It analyses comprehension of «competency profile», taken as an integrative index of the education result: this index enables to evaluate the learning process efficiency from the point of view of the requirements applied to the subject-matter specialist. The authors describe the monitoring conceptual framework and the possibility of its adaptation to reveal students’ readiness to maintain business activities and research. The conceptual model of the student’s competence profile is based on understanding the concept of readiness for any activity as personality integrative characteristic including needs, motivations, values and social attitudes. The article proves the procedure of students’ motivation diagnostics, the diagnostic procedure of their value system and intentions, and social attitudes. It articulates the way of developing and introducing the social psychological monitoring system, associated with sociological and psychological methods being included into the complex evaluation technique. These methods comprise: 1) estimation technique for the personnel involvement into the company activity; 2) Likert scale; 3) adopted motive classifications by P.M. Lapin and T.V. Razina; 4) M. Rokich’s methodology for value orientation study; 5) S. Schwartz’s methodology for measuring value orientations; 6) methods for IAT and VAAST attitudes indirect diagnostic.

In the period of the new corona virus spread we saw major changes in traditional daily living in total uncertainty. This work investigates the experience of making therapeutic decisions by long-term care patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Theoretically, the long-established medical decision patterns introduced into the chronic patients’ daily living can stop being effective in a such situation. Conceptually, the study was based on the core principles of the cognitive medical anthropology, when human cultural ideas about the disease and its treatment become fundamental for therapeutic decision making. In the pandemic time, formation of new knowledge about the virus, its consequences, its interaction with chronic diseases ran in the “here and now” mode. The research was to describe the mechanisms of the prepandemic cultural knowledge and creation of new knowledge in an unconventional situation that the long-term care patients had as the most important factor for the patient choice. Within the investigation framework, 11 depth interviews with chronically ill people were held.
The carried out analysis enabled to distinguish two basic models of long-term patients’ medical decision during the pandemic: (1) the model, comprising correction of a prepandemic treatment regimen and (2) the model, omitting correction of a prepandemic treatment regimen. The cultural (medical) knowledge and the problem of health care access proved to be the primary factors, affecting the long-term care patients’ medical decision in the pandemic period. The paper also describes the role of personal experience and the experience of “significant others”, “expert knowledge”, “stories of other people” (experience of unfamiliar people).