Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2025 number 3

Methods of numerical simulation were applied to studying the interaction of high-temperature air jets arranged in a mixing chamber of a triple-jet plasma-chemical direct-flow reactor. Computations produce the 3D distributions for velocity and temperature in the mixing chamber. Simulation indicates the flow circulation zones and the spatial temperature distributions on the inner walls of the reactor. The study offers the data on the heat flux for inner walls depending on the existence/absence of a thermal protection coating on the inner walls. This approach can be used for numerical simulation for multiple-jet reactors with different designs and purpose.

The density and thermal expansion of a liquid rubidium-lead alloy containing 50 at. % Pb were investigated for the first time by the gamma-ray attenuation technique in the temperature range from the liquidus to ~1000 K. It was found that the molar volume of the Rb₅₀Pb₅₀ melt is 30 % less than the molar volume of an ideal solution of the same composition. The temperature dependence of the melt density is highly nonlinear, therefore the volumetric coefficient of thermal expansion decreases by more than 1.5 times with an increase in temperature from 864 to 1010 K. Based on modern concepts of the structure of liquid metal systems with partially ionic nature of interatomic interaction, the behavior patterns of the thermal properties of a liquid alloy are briefly analyzed.

The article examines one of the modern arguments in favor of mathematical platonism - the explanatory indispensability argument. The philosophical prerequisites for the formulation of this argument are considered, namely: the philosophical views of the late W.V.O. Quine and the mature H. Putnam, H. Field’s “Science without Numbers” and M. Balaguer’s “New Fictionalism”, with special attention paid to the analysis of the concept of “nominalist realism” of the latter. That “nominalist realism” not only does not correspond to the views of theoretical physicists and chemists, but also faces a number of philosophical problems, is shown by using examples from theoretical physics, chemistry, and biology.

The semantics of types and tokens presented in the latest analytical philosophy in the research of J. Katz is considered in this article. The authors of the article argue that this semantic concept provides the most optimal interpretation of the functioning of natural language. This interpretation takes into account the advantages and disadvantages of the semantic projects of G. Frege and the late L. Wittgenstein.

The article critically examines the prevalent idea in analytical philosophy that the first-person singular pronoun “I” uniquely expresses the first-person perspective because of a direct correlation between an individual’s self-awareness and her ability to refer to herself with this pronoun. First, I outline the general idea of the problem concerning the linguistic expression of the first-person perspective. My focus is primarily on the problem of the cognitive significance of indexicals as well as the problem of ambiguity between de se and de re readings of the sentences involving indirect speech about an individual’s propositional attitudes. Many advocates of the criticized idea implicitly subscribe to the so-called “awareness condition”, while their explanation of how an individual acquires such awareness has a strong Cartesian flavor. Second, I argue that natural languages do allow impersonal use of the personal pronoun “I” and have multiple ways to express the first-person perspective. Both these facts challenge the idea of the unique role the pronoun “I” has in language systems. I propose to explain the lack of a single way to express the first-person perspective by referring to the context-dependent nature of language. To put it differently, the ways of expressing the first-person perspective depend on the context of use in communicative situations.

As is known, the Turing machine, developed long before the advent of computers, was not intended to take into account the interactions of programs, computers and other devices. However, the operation of the Internet and artificial intelligence involves different types of interactions. In modern computer science, various models have been created that take interactions into account. In this paper, I examined models of extended Turing machines and extended algorithms to determine whether the Turing machine model is adequate to describe and solve the problems that these models can handle. I showed that extended Turing machines correctly describe the behavior of the Turing model and successfully solve the problems that it can handle. Also, in the article I described the problem of controlling the movement of a car driven by a robot by a Turing machine, it does not cope with this problem, but extended Turing models provide a solution to it. Therefore, the question of the strict relationship between the capabilities of Turing machines and extended Turing machines remains open.

The article explores Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge and its relevance in contemporary scientific and technological contexts. It reviews the historical and epistemological background, the social dimension of collective tacit knowledge in science, and the challenges posed by the “black box” problem in artificial intelligence. Using the evolution of chess algorithms from Deep Blue to AlphaZero as a case study, the article illustrates the shift from explicit, formalized knowledge to opaque, tacit knowledge. It emphasizes the enduring importance of tacit knowledge for understanding the nature of scientific practice and modern cognitive systems.

This article analyzes the paradoxical role of Kant’s philosophy in the emergence of the historical turn. The central issue is that while Kant rejected empirical history as a foundation for philosophy, his critical system provoked a rethinking of philosophical knowledge as historically conditioned. Five core ideas are explored: 1) Kant’s “Copernican turn” as a model for later philosophical turns; 2) the interpretive opacity of his system as the origin of the hermeneutic tradition; 3) the concept of rational progress as a basis for historical philosophy; 4) the distinction between the historical turn and historicism; 5) the roles of Neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism in consolidating the historical approach. The author argues that the historical turn grew out of Kant’s discussions with his contemporaries, the internal tensions of the Kantian system and the reaction to it, especially in the 19th-20th centuries. As a result, philosophy, which for a long time had rejected the historical method, in the 20th century acquired the features of a historically reflexive discipline.

The work is a continuation of the previous article, devoted to turns in the history of philosophy. The author admits that the true meaning of the concept of a turn occurs when the authors of the turn make a return to the generic beginning in their philosophical practice, return to the generic source, turning to ancient and then mythological roots. A true turn occurs when the ontological foundations are questioned and the need arises to return to the beginning, in order to perform the act of thinking again through this return, in order to return ontological power to this act, and to man - his original place, so that he can begin to think again. In this case, it is assumed that a true turn begins when a philosopher makes a new, different beginning, turning to ancestral sources, thereby restoring the spiritual tradition. The author proposes to consider the hypothesis according to which all the turns that took place in the twentieth century are parts of the anthropological turn, since all of them in one way or another concerned primarily the ontological ill-being of man, concerned various aspects of his activity, revealing various kinds of human deficiencies and shortages - in knowledge, communication, in the means and methods of research, in language, logical analysis, spiritual practices, etc. In this case, different types of turns, be it linguistic, rhetorical, pragmatic and others, act as different attempts to fill this or that human deficit. Thus, the usual and well-known turns in the history of philosophy relate more to different kinds of practices for the development of those other means that a person needs - means of knowledge, or means of communication, or means of thinking, or linguistic means. But they all relate to the main and constant - to the anthropological turn, understood as the restoration of the source, an appeal to the ontological beginning, the restoration of the place of man in the world.

In the postpositivist philosophy of science, with all the variety of directions, the dominant tendency - the turn of the philosophy of science to the history of science - is quite generally recognized. Postpositivist interpretations of the history of science (T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, K. Popper, etc.) are created in explicit or implicit polemics with the positivist concept of evolution; and thus remain within the conceptual boundaries of this paradigm. In this regard, those versions of the history of science that go beyond this paradigm are of interest. They include E. Husserl’s concept, in which the history of science is viewed through the prism of the genesis of deductive sciences (geometry and mathematical physics) - from the emergence of the original sense to the formation of a scientific tradition in these theoretical sciences, which for each given generation of scientists acts as a “universal a priori of history”. The emergence of mathematical physics in the New Age is evaluated by him as a break with the previous scientific tradition, which means a crisis in science, which is accompanied by the crisis of European humanity as a whole. Based on E. Husserl’s works on the history of science, the article reconstructs a system of basic concepts that recreates a phenomenological version of the history of science.

The article attempts to reconstruct philosophically scientificity as a category based on the speculative-dialectical system of G.W.F. Hegel. Contrasting reductionist and rational approaches to scientific knowledge, the author focuses on the need to include scientific discourse in the sphere of reason (Vemunft), expressed in conceptual necessity. Particular attention is paid to the “Science of Logic” as the foundation of Hegel’s ontology and epistemology, as well as to the criticism of empiricism, positivism and formal logic as insufficient foundations for scientificity. The relevance of Hegel’s approach is substantiated in the context of the modern crisis of fragmented knowledge and reductionist strategies in science.

Decompositional Dual-Aspect Neutral Monism (DAM) aims to overcome the opposition between realism and idealism, eliminate the subject-object dualism, solve the quantum measurement problem and the hard problem of consciousness. We argue that DAM represents a form of idealism/antirealism and cannot serve as a philosophical foundation for quantum mechanics. At the same time, we believe DAM possesses heuristic value. The position can be reinterpreted from the perspective of Contextual Realism (CR), which rejects the premises of (post)modern philosophy and affirms that contextuality is both an epistemological and ontological feature of reality.

In the process of the development of modern science, researchers have obtained a large number of results, which make their own unique contribution to the formation of scientific knowledge. After F. Bacon, it is generally accepted that the scientific result or scientific knowledge, first of all, indicates knowledge obtained in an experiment or empirically. At the same time, as the history of science shows, experiments, as a rule, were not set up and carried out randomly, but were mainly conditioned by hypotheses formulated by great scientists in the process of their thinking on a special kind of being. In this regard, without denying the importance of an experiment in the process of scientific knowledge, we will formulate the following problem: does scientific knowledge arise in an experiment or is an experiment only a means of manifestation of a hypothetical idea of the general content of a special kind of being that has already arisen in thinking? Answering this question, we come to the conclusion that scientific knowledge constantly passes through аbstrаct, dialectical and speculative moments of a completely reasonable logical method of thinking. These moments of thinking are necessary prerequisite and condition for the emergence of scientific knowledge. Thus, it is revealed that scientific knowledge does not arise in the experiment itself, but is comprehended as such through repeated passage of moments of thinking.

The article attempts to comprehend the influence of such engineering science as synthetic biology on the ontological content of the direction in science known as technoscience. The author explicates the ontic composition of synthetic biology and further constructs the ontological content of this engineering-scientific direction. Specific examples of mutual influence of ontic and ontological are considered. The author has chosen the concept of distinction and mutual influence of ontic and ontological of German existentialist philosopher M.Heidegger as a theoretical and methodological basis for detecting changes in the ontological content of synthetic biology. The concepts of “technoepistemic object” and “technoscientific experimental system” by German philosophers T.Kohl and J.Falk, as well as the classification of objects by French philosopher Bernadette Bensaud-Vincent were used to investigate the modern ontological technoscience. For a more holistic ontological picture, some specific achievements and works of synthetic biologists were used. As a result, a causal determination between the ontic and the ontological is discovered, where the ontic, expanding and multiplying, is necessary to form new ontological-epistemological categories designed to characterise and explain such an entity, which did not exist before synthetic biology. The author has discovered possible conditions for the transformation of an epistemic object into a technoepistemic one, among which is the fulfilment of four criteria: they are familiar/ recognisable, value-laden, performative and have unrestricted materiality.

The paper provides a review of Penelope Maddy’s “A Plea for Natural Philosophy and Other Essays„ and contains a brief summаry of the main ideas of the essays published in the mentioned book.