The Phenomenological Method in the Ethics and Legal Philosophy of the XX Century

This paper analyzes the essence of the phenomenological method as it is used in certain theories in ethics and legal philosophy. The purpose of the paper is to provide a full study of phenomenology to determine its place in modern philosophical thought. The paper used methods of the history of philosophy, especially method of rational reconstruction, and based on interpretation of the classical phenomenological texts (E. Husserl, E. Levinas, A. Reinach). The main result of the paper is the justification that the unity of logic, ontology and ethics became the ground of application of the phenomenological method in the field of legal and ethical knowledge. Therefore the ideas of E. Levinas’s ethical phenomenology were the basis for understanding ethics as the “first philosophy” in a phenomenological context. The main conclusion of this paper is that the ethical dimension of responsibility for the actions of the subject and their consequences expands the horizons of phenomenological reduction and allows us to reveal the essence of legal reality in a new way. The paper was carried out within the framework of the HSE research project “Ethics and Law: correlation and mechanisms of mutual influence”.

Plural reconstruction: A method of critical theory for the analysis of emerging and contested political practices

In this article, I argue that Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction faces limitations when it comes to analysing newly emerging and contested political practices. As rational reconstruction aims to criticize existing practices by determining their normative meaning as reflected in the participants’ idealizing presuppositions, it reaches its limits where emerging and contested practices make it impossible to identify a shared self-understanding and a single participants’ perspective. Using the example of membership politics, I argue that this is often the case where nationally constituted forms of politics become controversial or are fundamentally questioned. Building on the work of Benhabib and Fraser, I develop an alternative reconstructive method of plural reconstruction, which modifies the basic premises of rational reconstruction, adjusting it to emerging and contested political contexts.

Richard Rorty and the Expediency of History of Philosophy (Foreword to the Ukrainian translation of Richard Rorty’s article “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres”)

For readers of the journal, we propose the first Ukrainian translation of the article "Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" by the American postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty, in which he considers possible strategies of historic-philosophical researches and their role in the development of philosophical thinking. Richard Rorty claims that the main task of historic-philosophical researches is to constantly change the philosophical canon, not to allow it to catch in certain stereotypical views of well-known philosophers who are part of it, for instance, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and others. Therefore, he accused doxography in the mummification of “famous philosophers” and neglect of those philosophers who worked on the border of philosophy, science, politics, economics, morality, medicine and even criminology. The involvement of such “non-philosophers”, as they are considered by historians-doxographers, in the philosophical canon expands the philosophical issues and stimulates the formulation of new philosophical questions, which are not on the agenda of the stiffened philosophical canon. Therefore, Richard Rorty rejects doxography as a genre of historic-philosophical researches, but instead of it proposed to use historical reconstruction, rational reconstruction and intellectual history as genres of historic-philosophical researches. Combining them, we will be able to see a vivid picture of the development of philosophy, not just certain canonical figures that cover another history of philosophy, which consists of research on the border of philosophy and other humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

Construction, Cognition, and the Role of the Surface

What do Babbitt’s theoretical commitments tell us about how to listen to his music? This chapter excavates Babbitt’s reading in analytical philosophy (particularly of Rudolf Carnap) and cognitive psychology (particularly of George A. Miller) in an attempt to answer that question. Babbitt’s compositional techniques are reviewed in this light: array construction, interdimensional parallelism (e.g., the use of the time-point system to complement the twelve-tone system), and cross-references are shown to be motivated by a desire to write music amenable to rational reconstruction (in Carnap’s term) and sensitive to theories of memory and information processing. Babbitt’s views on Schenker are revisited: he found Schenkerian analysis to represent a model for musical memory. His understanding of language, too, is conditioned by his reading of philosophy and cognitive science. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limitations of Babbitt’s psychology as a guide to the analysis of his music.

Indexing the humanities knowledge in the Library Bibliographic Classification

Changing scientific knowledge entails the exclusion of some areas of research and inclusion of others into the main line of development of science, with the new publications revising well-established concepts and offering the new ones. Any rational reconstruction of the history of science has to identify the line of development that has resulted in the modern knowledge.The Soviet Library and Bibliographic Classification developed in the mid-20th century responded to the challenges of the epoch. The paradigm shift of the 1990s in this country resulted in the conceptual revision of scientific values and the emergence of new academic disciplines. That period gave rise to applied studies with their specific goals and values, standards and norms.In the recent period, the humanities studies proliferate to construct generalized interdisciplinary theory. The vast number of publications in the humanities knowledge suggests that the appropriate place for these studies within the structure of the national Library Bibliographic Classification has to be found.

Lockdowns and their legitimacy in the context of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy and liberalism

Since the beginning of 2020, lockdowns have been introduced in numerous countries across the world in response to the emergence of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that causes the COVID-19 disease. Although the topic of lockdowns has been considered from numerous perspectives, it has not yet been analyzed in the context of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy and liberalism. This paper aims to list – at least to some extent, as the topic is very broad – the most prominent arguments that have arisen in the worldwide discussion on the effectiveness and side effects of lockdowns. In addition, the work provides some elements of Smith’s economic philosophy and liberalism. Finally, the arguments that have arisen in the academic discussion since the introduction of lockdowns are analyzed, and the legitimacy of lockdowns is assessed in the context of Smith’s principles. The methods used for the analysis are text exegesis and rational reconstruction. As far as the conclusions are concerned, an explicit assessment of the legitimacy of lockdowns in the discussed context is considered impossible, although for many elements of Smith’s liberalism, lockdowns are not legitimate at all.

THE CONTEXTUALIST REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY

For many decades the methodology of “Rational Reconstruction”, which was also labeled as the appropriation-ism or presentism, dominates the Early modern philosophy scholarship. In the core of the methodology was the claims that one can read the Early Modern thinkers as 'colleagues' to the Modern Philosophy and the “Whig” interpretation of relation between the Early modern science and philosophy. Recently, the Early modern philoso-phy scholarship witnesses the methodological transformation that Ch. Mercer proposed to term as the “Contextu-alist Revolution”. In my paper I briefly contours the “Rational Reconstruction” methodology. Then I discuss the main claims of the Contextualist methodology and describe the innovative revisions results that it introduced brought in the Early modern scholarship.

Extraordinary Partisanship

This chapter addresses the question of what kind of a political agent could bring about a supranational separation of constituent and constituted powers in the EU. Given that an endogenous process of change seems unlikely, it asks which exogenous forces could trigger the establishment of a higher-level constituent power. In particular, the chapter engages with the idea that transnational partisanship could function as a vehicle for constituent power in the EU. It argues that the model of networked constituent power, according to which cross-border deliberation between members of like-minded parties should initiate and guide intergovernmental treaty making at the EU level, is unconvincing because it relies on establishes parties, which must be regarded as quasi-constituted powers. By means of a rational reconstruction of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, the chapter then develops an alternative model of extraordinary partisanship. An extraordinary partisan association ‘co-opts’ regular parliamentary elections to acquire a mandate for a project of constitutional change. Such an organization could enable citizens from various member states to promote an opening up of the EU polity for the exercise of constituent power.