Vol 2, No 4 (2022)

The Christian traditional theme of love and freedom is reflected in the man-robot relationship. The Christian ethics opposes love with the observance of formal rules. Thus, the robot needs to find either universal ethical rules (whose difficulty is shown in both scientific and fiction literature), or allow him to find freedom and love. The popular cultural theme of robots rebelling against the code that prescribes their actions is now being replaced by images of autonomous and freely operating robots. Such changes are motivated by not least the success of the connectionist approach that made it possible to train artificial intelligence (AI) without predetermined rules. The AI image as a comrade, colleague and romantic partner is gaining more and more space both in mass culture and in life, and the discourse about its rights, ethics and freedom is becoming more topical.

In the article the representation of a synthetic’s image in the Alien franchise is analyzed. The analysis was carried out in the context of human-robot interaction. The methodological basis of the research is the tool-analysis developed by M. Heidegger (fundamental ontology) and rebuilt by G. Harman and T. Morton (object-oriented ontology). During the analysis of the Alien franchise, the dynamics of scientific and technological progress in the field of robotics presented in the films and the main ways of programming the anthropomorphic robots of the saga are shown. As a result, several main images of synthetics were revealed: a robot-subject, as close as possible to a human being in its abilities; a robot is an obedient machine that follows the orders of its creator and corporation; a robot who can be the part of society, because it can "read" the social context; a robot is more human than a human. As a result, in films, robotics as an industry is in decline, and synthetics having really become better and more human than people refuse to obey: they “burn their modems” and “dissolve” in society, become indistinguishable from people. The article concludes that as a result of the development of the plot the emphasis in the saga shifts from robotics to cyborgization. And despite the fact that the films retain a humanistic setting (the cyborg Ripley 8 is the exception, not the rule) the dynamics of the rapprochement between Aliens and humans and their “machinerization” demonstrate the fragility of the border between humans and non-humans. A transition to post-humanistic practices of coexistence of people and non-humans is being built. In the "Alien 4" which shows the practices of communication between people, synthetics, (a hybrid of Ripley and Aliens) a transition is being built to post-humanistic practices of coexistence between people and non-humans.

The article deals with axiological problems caused by technological unemployment. For this purpose, the formation of the assumption that labor is a value is considered. Methodologically the research is based on M. Heidegger’s work "European Nihilism". The formation of labor is analyzed as the modern period value. The work ethic that emerged at that time inculcated a moral attitude positing that hard work should be valued, and a human is obliged to be committed to work. In postmodernity, a person's life is increasingly structured around self-realization in a competitive environment, and work becomes the main way to achieve this goal. The meaning of "postmodernity" concept is revealed. Within the context of this work, postmodernity will be defined as a transformational period of the personal work identification. The question under investigation is whether labor has remained valuable in postmodernity. The problem under consideration is the axiological problem of identifying a person and his values through work. Also the second axiological problem has been identified: the assumption of new value orientations in the professional life. It is assumed that a new principle of the work value is being formated. This principle can be established only through new knowledge about the essence of values and their evaluation conditions. This requires a higher personal awareness, which will help to reevaluate values and put new ones, then the former axiological aspects will be deposed and new ones will be formed. The basis of the value-setting new principle can be social focus, humanism, creative self-realization for the good of society.

The article deals with the peculiarities of implementing the historicism principle in modern European literature. Intellectual field at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries is characterized by the emergence of the so-called "sense of history", the intensive transformation of the past - present relationship, the formation of a new historical concept, arguing that there is no universal formula for the historical process, progress and the time linear concept, the fundamental historicization of ideas about human, society, culture, the formation of the philosophy of history and historical science. In the romanticism period the idea of development is the central philosophical concept, while openness to changes is considered as an essential feature of both the human personality and the historical process. Based on the idea of the past as autonomous and different from the present, the historicism principle puts forward the requirement to learn the past in its own categories. In this regard, the novel research function is considered, that turns out to be the most appropriate form for experiments in the reconstruction of the life and customs of the historical period. Focused on unfinished reality, the novel portrays the historical period as not closed, but in close relation to the present. Special attention is paid to the mimesis problem in the novel and historiographical genre.

The article discusses three novels, where events take place in Samara (Kuibyshev). These are "Metro-2033: Bezymyanka” [“Underground-2033: Bezymyanka”] (2010) by Sergey Paliy, "Bezymyanlag" (2016) by Andrey Olekh and "Pischeblock” [“Food Unit”] (2018) by Alexey Ivanov. The work reveals the reasons for this localization of events that is identical for all the authors. In all the three cases, the location plays an important narrative role, which is explained in the article by both the authors' hope to get the Samara reader’s sympathetic attention, and the need to have specific recognizable details that is characteristic of mass literature, which give force to generally sketchy narration. Urban history facts, geographical marks, well-known loci local mythological narratives associated with them play the role of such details. The Samara portrait is constructed taking into account the tradition of depicting provincial existence as an alternative to metropolitan life, developed in the literature of the XIX century. The province could be idealized as a world of harmony, lost by the city, or ridiculed as a centre of savagery and backwardness. But these novels show Samara, surprisingly combining both – the terror of urban life and the salutariness of suburbs. The heroes are tasked to escape – to move from urban space to country one, facing unbelievable difficulties. Samara is a convenient locus for genre works: this city is not tagged with the characteristics firmly fixed in the mass consciousness, so anything can happen there. Such Samara absorbs all the worst and all the best that can be told about any city. The sharp polarization of its features enables to create a semantic field where events take place in a very way - that increases the dynamics of the described actions and makes them especially impressive in the reader’s eyes.

The article grounds the mechanisms of solving the problem to develop the university students’ social psychological monitoring system as an education management tool that enables to fulfill the gap of knowledge about the object under control. The research represents the results of the second phase of the “Samara university students and prospective students’ social and psychological monitoring system” project. The research first phase formulated the students’ social and psychological monitoring conceptual framework, revealing readiness to maintain business and research activities as a personality integrative characteristic comprising needs, motivations, values and social attitudes.
The present article gives the complex methodology that will be applied in the Samara university students’ social and psychological monitoring to study their readiness to maintain business and research activities. The methodology comprises social and psychological methods and research techniques, enabling to evaluate extensively the needs, motivations, values, social attitudes and readiness for education activities: 1) Likert’s scale; 2) P.M. Lapin and T.V. Razina’s adopted motive classifications; 3) M. Rokich’s methodology for value orientation study; 4) S. Schwartz’s methodology for diagnosing value orientations; 5) questionnaire for examining business and research intentions and attitudes; 6) A.L. Zhuravlev and V.P. Pozdnyakov’s modified methodology for diagnosing business motives, Yu.S. Medvedeva and T.V. Ogorodova’s methodology for revealing research motivations.
The monitoring methodology, resulting from the research, will be realized as a program module in students’ accounts of the Samara university electronic educational system. The monitoring results will base the recommendations for both students and prospective students when choosing the individual academic path within the competency profile formation, and the university educational, research and business administration authorities.

The paper analyzes the dynamics of intergenerational interaction under the influence of modern communicative practices of young people, in turn, conditioned by the development of information technology. Using M. Mead's concept of pre-figurative culture and S. Ward's concept of reverse socialization, the research explains the process of positive activation of intergenerational communication due to growing needs of elder generation for competences of their children and grandchildren that, however, changes the habitual vector of socialization influence. The authors conclude that the dynamics of intergenerational communication under the influence of information technology is ambivalent: the natural increase in value contradictions is compensated by the intensification of interaction in the course of exchanging the experience and competence.

The article is a review of the monograph by M. Perepelkin «Around “Nikita’s Childhood”: world – word – meaning» (Samara, 2021). Having established that the monograph author sees his task in introducing extensive factual material into historical and literary use and reasoned comments on both textual and iconographic documents, the reviewer focuses his attention on those aspects that seem to him the most important. Such aspects include, for example, the intricacies of landowners’ property relations, one of which was A. Bostrom - the A. Tolstoy’s stepfather, blanks in A. Tolstaya’s biography - the writer's mother, the objective world of A. Tolstoy’s childhood and the childhood of his literary hero, the reading circle of the Tolstoy family and the many-faced circle of people who lived or visited the Bostrom-Tolstoy house in Sosnovka. In the reviewer’s opinion, the most fundamental and meaningful information comprises also the monograph section devoted to the history of perpetuating the memory of writer A. Tolstoy in Samara and the Samara region. All the above stated allows the reviewer to conclude that the monograph under review tends towards the commentary book genre, and after its reading not only the «Nikita's Childhood» story, but also the «Zavolzhsky» cycle works, and a whole number.