The article considers philosophical aspects in the issue of evil, its genesis and principal ontological issues: the good and evil balance, the absoluteness and relativity of evil in history and culture, evil and transcendence, evil and God, evil as a paradox of human existence, evil as a punishment for man and as a possibility salvation. In their analysis, the authors proceed from the assumption that good and evil are the extreme that are unattainable for an ordinary person. Good and evil are the phenomena of life, living only in a special state – that of tension, despair, pity, hatred. Without that transcending (to God or the devil), good and evil are just abstractions. To be evil means to have the opportunity and power to raise oneself to the demonic level or sink into the abyss of the animal state. To be kind means to be holy, at least a very living person, in whom there is no carrion.

The Religion-Science relationship is often understood as problematic one and they themselves as sides in the confrontation between clericalism and scientism. The background of those polemic party positions contributes to standing out the study of the positive significance of theological toposes, tropes, mythologemes in science when it is conducted secularly, and even more emphatically atheistically. One of the vivid examples for that occurs in the reflections of two French philosophers of Russian origin, Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojève. By studying the genesis of science, Koyré discovers that modern mathematical physics requires a homogeneous world, and it became so for the first time in Christian Europe in the 16–17th centuries. Kojève continues Koyré’s reflections – according to him, the application of the celestial science of mathematics to terrestrial physics became possible through the habit of European thinkers to the scandalous thought about the Incarnation of God, about the possibility for the infinity and for the perfection to be born in the flesh and thus “heal” it. The positions of both have their origin in Hegel’s thoughts, but in some points they do not agree with him. The research consists of three parts published in three separate articles on the foundation of Modern science at Koyré, Kojève and Hegel. The first part is about Alexandre Koyré.

. Understanding of the language in the works by J.G. Hamann is considered as preceding the M. Heidegger’s philosophy of language. However, if Heidegger refuses the theological concepts and thinks the language exclusively in an ontological way, Hamann understands the language not in an ontological, but in an ontotheological way. Hamann’s apprehension of the word as both the ground of all things and the basis of human understanding is discussed. The relationship between the word of God and the word of man; speech as a “translation” of the God’s word, that sounds in the creation, into the human language; the specifics of the language situation after the fall, are discussed as the essential themes of Hamann’s philosophy of language. The historicity of human language and speech and the interrelations between language, creativity and sexuality are posed as important themes of Hamann’s controversy with the contemporary to him philosophy of the Enlightenment contesting the instrumental understanding of language characteristic of the Enlighteners and their understanding of reason as having no external preconditions, a supraindividual and supra-historical instance.

The paper investigates the religious language interpretation in the contemporary continental philosophic theology. The author presents the central role of the imagination and metaphor in theological language. The diacritical hermeneutics of Richard Kearney is analyzed as an example of the theological language transition from the theologics to theopoetics. Modifications in the theological language are associated with transformations in the understanding of theology itself, which becomes a topological and tropological study. It considers the interpretation of imagination in Kearney’s early works, his attempts to describe “paradigmatic shifts” in the human understanding of imagination in different epochs of Western history. The author highlights mimetic paradigm of the pre-modern imagination, productive paradigm of the modern imagination and parodic paradigm of the postmodern imagination. Analysis of Kearney’s “biblical” interpretation of imagination allows one to understand the imagination as the point of contact of God with humanity. She also considers how Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor influences the development of the poetic language in postmodern Christian theology and demonstrates that poetic and religious languages are brought together by an “imaginative variations”. The author argues that turning to imagination in religious language allows theological hermeneutics to move from the static to kinetic images of God.

The article examines an issue of the crisis in culture, as one of the most relevant and discussed ones in modern humanitarian discourse, not only in Russia, but also abroad. The processes of strengthening the country’s security are inextricably linked to the circumstances of a socio-cultural nature, the issues of the cultural, civilizational originality and identity of society. Sociocultural security determines the ability of a society to self-reproduce and spiritually progress basing on national originality and cultural community. The results of recent public opinion studies within Russians clearly record the perception among the population of threats to the sociocultural order associated with issues of identity, a decline in morals and culture, with reduced access to cultural values and cultural inequality. The article presents results of the sociological research “Monitoring of public opinion of the population regarding current sociocultural threats”, conducted in 2019, analyzes the public opinion of Russians and experts on the manifestations of the cultural crisis and sociocultural threats in modern Russia.

Socio-political cooperation determines the quality and content of relations between the state, society and people, including at the regional level. The purpose of the article is to assess the nature and content of socio-political cooperation, the possibilities of nominating representatives in the region. The article defines the subjects of that cooperation and their representatives in the socio-political space of the region. It is noted that the cooperation of subjects and representatives, unites all interested groups in the implementing decisions of local authorities in the region, creates conditions contributing to the realization of the population potential for its real participation in regional transformations in various fields. Based on the materials of a questionnaire survey conducted in the Kemerovo region, the authors identify issues that maintain the cooperation between the authorities and the population, the expression of interests and participation in it, the opportunities for nominating representatives. In conclusion, the authors infer that there are different degrees of expression of interests in socio-political cooperation among social groups (men and women, youth), the willingness to delegate the solution of their issues to representatives. Those representatives act as a real driving force in expressing the intentions and interests of the authorities and the population, they contribute to the effective participation of various social groups in the transformation of the region.

The paper presents the results of a series of sociological studies carried out in Moscow Region, Russia’s largest heterogeneous region, illustrating the numerous manifestations of precariousness in all major spheres of the economic and social life, intensified in the context of the measures taken to counter the spread of COVID-19. A description of the global manifestations of the spread of precarity in the context of the current pandemic is supplemented with a discussion of the Russian peculiarities of combating the pandemic and aspects of life under quarantine in the capital region, as well as the effects thereof on precarity. Subtle aspects of the attitude of Russia’s residents to the official information about the epidemic and the authorities efforts to counter the spread of coronavirus are presented. Special attention is paid to the peculiarities of doing business in the context of a large-scale lockdown, directly contributing to an increase in precarity in its various manifestations. Relevant current issues, potential solutions, and information manipulations of the collective consciousness are discussed.

Based on the data of the all-Russian survey of pensioners, the article considers an approach to determining the structure and model of health maintenance practices. The analysis and construction of a model of health maintenance is carried out through the prism of four practices related to the “stereotypical type of healthy lifestyle”: proper (rational) nutrition; physical culture, sports; giving up bad habits; preventive medical examination. For a more visual demonstration are considered the models of behavior of all Russian pensioners and a special group of pensioners – those who believe that “we ourselves” are responsible for the state of their health. The results indicate the dominance of a socially approved position in the responses, which is poorly correlated with real behavior and efforts to maintain health. Awareness of responsibility for their own health does not encourage Russian pensioners to take active actions to maintain it. The model of maintaining health in the group of “consciously caring” pensioners “” differs little from the models of maintaining the health of pensioners in general. It is represented mainly by “1st and 2nd practice models”, in the structure of which the leading position is occupied by the practice of giving up smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. The proposed approach can allow us not only to understand which model of health maintenance dominates in a particular group, but also to estimate the completeness of the use of practices and the intensity of health care by individuals.

Medieval cartography had a wide functionality. The world map served as a historiographical and didactic tool, a spiritual guide, a mnemonic matrix, a visual encyclopedia, a philosophical model, a means of meditative practices, a manuscript illustration, an exegetical and moralizing text, a method for transmitting of narrative information, ideological and pedagogical concepts. To process a vast layer of data contained in authoritative verbal sources, the rumination method was used by a medieval cartographer. And to create the map itself, it was necessary to carry out preliminary speculative modeling and solve the tasks of the artistic reproduction of the world model on a two-dimensional picture plane. An experiment in the humanities, including art history, is not a widespread method, but its application, in that case, can be effective. Taking into account the information contained in main verbal sources and following the path of the medieval cartographer, a speculative world model meeting the basic medieval worldview requirements was created in the article. Following the experiment, the basic representational principles of the image of the world were successfully identified, as well as the artistic techniques with which those principles could be applied on the visual plane were determined.

The article studies the book illustration by the English artist Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), the features of his work in the context of time and the experience that can be used in the process of teaching the book design and illustration. Here, research interest is focused on six main techniques that the artist actively used when illustrating in the children’s books in England in the late 19 – early 20th century. The name of A. Rackham and his graphics, are entirely associated with the English Art Nouveau. Having studied the graphic heritage of A. Rackham, on the example of his seven illustrations for children’s books, one can trace how A. Rackham’s creative credo was formed. The artist managed to move away from imitation of the English Victorian style, the Eastern and Western charts, medieval manuscripts and came to his own version of the Neo-Gothic in the art of the English book.

The article examines numerous portraits of the outstanding Indian writer and philosopher of the twentieth century Rabindranath Tagore as a special phenomenon. The famous thinker was painted by dozens of artists, including Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganedranath Tagore, Mukul Chandra Dey, Atul Bose, William Rothenstein, Muirhead Bon, Boris Georgiev, Xu Beihun. Artists’ interest in the figure of the poet increased markedly after the award of the Nobel Prize to R. Tagore in 1913. Gradually, in the period of the 1920s – 1930s certain “rules” for the image of the thinker were formed tacitly. The authors of the article highlight the prerequisites for that phenomenon and analyze the existing iconography, which was especially actively manifested in the posthumous portraits of the poet. The article stresses several aspects and possible causes of the phenomenon. One of which is associated with the transition of Tagore’s artistic image into the symbol field: having gone beyond the boundaries of his native culture, R. Tagore’s portraits gradually began to carry a corpus of ideas related to the achievements in the field of science and art not only in India but also in the whole East, personifying its wisdom.