Vol 29, No 2 (2025): CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY AND SOCIAL SECURITY

This research delves into the socio-philosophical dimensions of security, assessing its metaphysical and existential aspects and considering how existential threats reshape philosophical perspectives in the contemporary society. The relevance of this study is underscored by the urgent need to understand how traditional and non-traditional security threats - ranging from military conflicts to cybercrime and climate change - impact societal structures and individual freedoms. The paper highlights the intersection of social structures and security, revealing how security is instrumentalised by various actors, including governments, to control or influence social dynamics. Moreover, it emphasizes how media representation and public fear can influence political decision-making, urging a critical examination of how security discourses are constructed and whose interests they serve. By integrating socio-philosophical perspectives, this paper establishes a framework for understanding security as a multifaceted phenomenon. Notably, this research underscores the role of cultural, psychological, and ethical dimensions in shaping public understanding and policy responses to security threats. Key findings illustrate that contemporary security cannot be narrowly defined; rather, it necessitates an integrated approach encompassing political, economic, social, and environmental considerations and a re-evaluation of traditional security models to address contemporary challenges such as cybersecurity threats and digital ethics. Ultimately, this work argues for highlighting the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches in developing contemporary security strategies effectively addressing fluctuating dynamics of the international agenda.

The study analyzes the concept of socio-cultural code, which has insufficient definition in modern social and humanitarian knowledge. The author’s interpretation of this concept is offered. It is based on the methodology of philosophical personalism, in which personality is presented as a source of relatively free and creative spiritual and practical activity. The product of this activity is culture, which in turn has a significant impact on the formation of personality. The expediency of understanding the socio-cultural code as a set of worldview constants, both conscious and subconscious, is argued. The relationship of the concept of socio-cultural code with such traditional concepts of social philosophy as “public consciousness”, “worldview”, “mentality” is clarified. The authors come to the conclusion that the concept of socio-cultural code in its scope is intermediate between mentality and public worldview. It is broader than the first, but narrower than the second, since the public worldview may also include non-constant elements that quickly transform or even disappear in socio-historical time. It is noted that the concept of socio-cultural (cultural) code directly relates to the sphere of ensuring national security, and this is indicated by its use in the Strategy of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025. In the Strategy, it is given a predominantly ideological significance. It is asserted that it is groundless to classify even some elements of the socio-cultural code as a priori, innate qualities of representatives of a particular community. All its elements without exception are of an a posteriori nature, manifesting themselves as properties of individuals that are formed in the processes of their socialization and enculturation. The recognition of the fundamentally a posteriori nature of both the socio-cultural code and public mentality and worldview, according to the authors, allows us to get rid of the illusory reliance on the nature of things and seriously focus attention on the reproduction of culture as the most important factor in ensuring national security. In addition to measures to strengthen political and economic sovereignty, it must necessarily include a set of actions aimed at maintaining the continuity of public consciousness.

This study examines the concept of societal security, distinguishing it from other forms of security, and highlights crisis management as a key area for applying this framework in the analysis of social phenomena. The functioning of societal security mechanisms is illustrated through the case of community resilience to natural disasters, specifically focusing on responses to floods in Germany and the Czech Republic. Using a descriptive case study method, the research identifies differences in how these two countries build societal resilience to disaster risks. The authors argue that Germany and the Czech Republic vary not only in the amount of available social, economic, human, and physical capital but also in how these resources are utilized. The presence of resources alone is not sufficient to guarantee effective crisis resolution or societal security in the face of natural hazards. The study finds that the key divergence lies in the balance between strategies of resource mobilization and exploitation. The Czech Republic tends to rely on mobilization, while Germany emphasizes the exploitation of existing capacities. This imbalance shapes their respective approaches to societal security and affects the resilience of communities to flood-related risks. The authors conclude that there are currently no clear prospects for restoring balance between these strategies in either country. They stress the need for coordinated governance, integrated problem-solving, and clearly defined responsibilities across institutions. Without such mechanisms, communities may face existential threats due to ineffective crisis management.The study also warns that inadequate disaster response and prevention can undermine public trust in state institutions, potentially leading to political instability. From this perspective, societal security emerges as a vital dimension of national well-being and sustainable development.

Authors base their study upon research materials of the gamer communities, analyze the risks of deconstruction of ethnic, religious and gender identity for modern Russian society. The phenomenon of virtual identity is considered as a part of philosophical - anthropological paradigm, taking into account the current social context and possible prospects. Using the methodological principles of E. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, as well as P. Berger and T. Luckmann’s social constructionalism, and P. Bourdieu’s theory of social field they describe the mechanisms of construction of social reality by representatives of the community of gamers, who act as agents of habitualization of a new type of social space - virtual reality. After analyzing the typical frameworks of interpersonal and intragroup interaction in the form of interviews, the authors came to the conclusion that “traditional” types of self-identification through attribution with an ethnic or religious group lose in the studied environment not only their relevance, but also the function of maintaining the “I-structure”. At the same time, the ontology of the game often actualizes virtual masculinity in a hypertrophied form, which can hide its compensatory nature. Thus, the phenomenon of virtual personality is becoming more and more widespread and “real”. The gamer community in this case is just one of the most striking examples of such social transformations. At the same time, the extinction of traditional identities combined with the internalization of latent narratives, embedded in the plots of most games by their developers increase the risks of erosion of such a complex socio-cultural space as modern Russian society.

The proposed research examines one of the less known receptions of Kantian thought in Russian philosophy: the ideas about the figure of “monstrous Kant” in the works of Ya.E. Golosovker. The relevance of this study is linked not only to the lack of accessibility and poor research of the latter’s legacy, but also to the originality of his interpretation of Kant’s philosophy and its concordance with the general understanding of Kant’s foundations in Russian thought. The goal is to fill a gap in studies of Kantology devoted to Russian receptions of Kant’s philosophy, while explaining some aspects of how appropriate it is to interpret the image of Kant as proposed by Ya.E. Golosovker. The proposed image reflects those features and aspects of Kantian philosophy that are most essential for Russian religious philosophers. The image of Kant as a “caricature philosopher” differs fundamentally from the true Kant, and has important methodological significance in understanding the connection between epistemology and ethics in Russian philosophy.

The Camus' philosophical views were greatly influenced by F. Nietzsche. The authors of the research analyze several aspects of this influence. First of all, the article concerns Nietzsche's “death of God” concept and its reflection in Camus's key concept - the concept of absurdity. The authors come to the conclusion that Camus's philosophy of absurdity in a certain sense can be seen as a consistent development of the Nietzsche’s “death of God” concept, as a deducing all the consequences from it. The parallel in the views of the two philosophers can also be traced in two other aspects - in Nietzsche's concept of eternal return and its peculiar embodiment in the Camus’ image of Sisyphus, as well as in the Nietzsche’s idea of three transformations of the spirit and its refraction in the idea of Prometheus' revolt in Camus’ philosophy. The authors conclude that in the case of the first aspect we can speak of a significant similarity and parallelism of the ideas of the two thinkers. But the second aspect - Nietzsche's idea of three stages of spirit and Camus's idea of revolt as represented in the image of Prometheus - shows a serious discrepancy between them. In the third transformation of spirit named “child” the spirit moves from negation all previous values to the creation of the new ones. This process can be characterized as active nihilism and implies uncompromising rejection and destruction of old values, which becomes the basis for the formation of new ones. Such a position inevitably implies the unlimited freedom of the individual, the chosen one, who is able to rise to this height of spiritual development. Such a position is a response to the “death of God”. Camus's revolt is also a response to the absurdity as a parallel to Nietzsche’s “death of God” situation. But it has its origin not in the absolute freedom of the individual, but in a sense of solidarity. It is born out of the desire to help others, to improve their situation. It comes out of the desire for the common good of all people. Such revolt thus cannot be unlimited; on the contrary, it is subject to the law of measure, to the proportionality of destruction and the good to be brought about.

The coexistence of traditional everyday practices and their transformed models brought about by digital technologies is a problem of paramount relevance. The aim of the research is to understand the shifts in everyday existence, indicating the opposition between “pre-digital” and digital everyday life. Three interrelated thematic lines are analyzed. The first involves considering the characteristics of the dynamically changing situation of digital existence and the trends of “fusion” between human cognitive potential and intelligent devices. The second line is associated with reliance on the semantics of such concepts as proxy culture, virtual rationality, multitasking, Big Data, and the metaverse, which blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real. The third thematic line is aimed at the analysis of traditional everyday patterns that indicate a self-sufficient connection of stability, goal setting revolving around urgent needs, stereotypes, representations of the typical and weakly reflected patterns of thinking. The legacy of A. Schutz, G. Garfinkel, J. Hoffmann, E. Husserl, M. Heidegger is involved in the analysis of the characteristics of everyday life. The author uses comparative analysis, the assembly method and the dialectical method aimed at identifying contradictions. The study shows, firstly, that the “self-understanding” of everyday life practices aimed at maintaining the “self-sufficient connection of stability” is combined with everyday creativity; secondly, that digital interactions require a radical shift to new forms of skills. The author comes to conclusions about the technological “splitting” of everyday life and digital alienation. The narrowing of the area of “immediate authenticity of experience” and real interpersonal relationships displaces the mode of perceiving reality into a zone of non-reflexivity. Delegation of one’s powers to intelligent systems has become widespread in digital everyday life. Рroxy practices or “acting by proxy” demonstrates the process of replacing human subjectivity, when contact with a real person becomes optional and unnecessary.

Since its inception, the artificial intelligence program has relied on a positivistic, anti-psychological philosophical paradigm, in which a purely physicalistic description of thinking processes assumed their adequate modeling using logical machines relevant to the tasks and goals, such as Turing (1960s-70s). Optimistic expectations of positive results immediately ran into both technical difficulties and purely conceptual difficulties. However, when the urgent problem of philosophical revision of the basic AI paradigm arose, Kant’s theory of consciousness and thinking was not seriously considered and was criticized in the 1990s. Since the 2000s, we have seen impressive successes in the use of artificial neural networks with deep learning architecture in the field of modeling thinking and complex biological processes. It seemed that the main goal of the AI program - achieving strong AI - was just a matter of time. But the direct implementation of the connectionism concept in working with large volumes of associative and fuzzy arrays of information turned out to be generally ineffective in the field of representing the intellectual abilities of consciousness, especially in the representation of high-level knowledge and precise processing of symbolic information, i.e. higher cognitive abilities. At the same time, some AI specialists and cognitive philosophers turned to Kant’s philosophy of consciousness, which embodied such a transcendental organization of the macroarchitecture of an intellectual system that has an active cognitive activity, but does not correspond to modern ideas about the various mechanisms for processing input and output data in a cognitive system. Such cognition is fundamentally active, since it is a product of the synthesis of the ability of productive imagination. To identify this macroarchitecture, the Kantian transcendental method is used, which consists in the fact that the transcendental architecture of any consciousness is not created as a result of empirical studies of human intellectual abilities, the functioning of brain processes or the achievements of evolutionary biology, but is constructed based on the a priori conditions of the very possibility of its existence. This Kantian method aims to reveal an a priori structure of consciousness that is isomorphic to any rationally knowing subject. The study examines what Kant’s philosophy has to offer AI and cognitive science.

The research examines freedom as a philosophical problem. The philosophical understanding of freedom allows us to consider it as a speculative idea or an ideal construction underlying its numerous manifestations, as well as a life practice within the framework of social and spiritual life, including politics, religion and culture. It seems that the essence of freedom cannot be understood as a simple mechanical set of various and not always related, disparate ideas, points of view, teachings. It is important to keep in mind that multiple and different meanings of freedom are usually interconnected. The question of the nature of freedom is a question of its philosophical understanding. It is noted that freedom as a philosophical problem is not only a special value, spiritual quality, internal necessity, existential state, but also a concept that underlies its historical and metaphysical understanding. It is noted that the nature of human free will reflects both the internal spiritual state of a person and the reaction to the influence of external factors. Freedom as a value for which people go to death, personifies the highest human virtues, that is, freedom turns out to be the goal of human development. The philosophical foundations of freedom as an internal necessity “in the name of freedom” presuppose both a reflection of “responsibility” for freedom and an understanding of it as a special spiritual value. The historical practice of understanding freedom was based on the search for its nature in situations of choice of both overcoming necessity, on the one hand, and overcoming coercion, on the other. In addition, it was important to understand freedom as gaining independence and overcoming unfreedom. Therefore, civil liberties and human rights were of particular importance, as well as systems of governance for development, preserving individual freedoms and ensuring the well-being of society within the framework of a complex interaction between individual rights and group public interests. Social aspects of freedom clarify the role of cultural ideas in encouraging or hindering individual autonomy. Ethical connections between freedom and concepts of morality are noted. The interaction between moral obligations, social norms and individual behavior is considered in reasoning about the ethical consequences of freedom.

Information technologies, globalization process, active migration processes, political conflicts and other factors are transforming the modern world, forcing society to adapt to these new realities. Globalization, on the one hand, promotes the expansion of civic identity and the formation of a new type of citizenship, and on the other hand, it can lead to the loss of cultural diversity and global colonialism. The study examines the concept of citizenship and its impact on modern society in the context of globalization and transformations of the world order. Citizenship is one of those concepts whose content defines the relationship between an individual and his state and nation. Civil identification is directly related to the self-identification of a person. On the one and, globalization, and on the other hand, global political instability actualize the problems of citizenship, forcing us to turn to the analysis of the content of the concept itself. The purpose of the work is to consider different interpretations of the concept of “citizen” and “citizenship” in both domestic and foreign studies. The author focuses on the fact that in Russian scientific discussions the concept of citizenship is often associated with patriotic education, while in the Western tradition the emphasis is on democratic values. A contextual analysis of the statements of thinkers, educators, and public figures of the 18th century - the era of the spread of the concept of “citizen” in Russia - allowed us to see how the content of the concept was formed in the Russian tradition, to clarify its ambiguity in the process of filling in additional meanings and meanings. Despite the change of epochs and some semantic changes, the continuity of the understanding of citizenship in the Russian pedagogical tradition remains. Disclosure of the content of the concepts of “citizen” and “citizenship” is necessary to define the goals and objectives of programs aimed at civic education. The analysis has shown that the concept of citizenship in the Russian context has historically developed specific connotations associated with the ideological constants of the Russian people, the inclusion of moral and capacious personality qualities in its content. Historical figures and thinkers form the concept of a citizen as a morally responsible and devoted person, emphasizing the importance of serving society. This idea is becoming central to the formation of Russian identity and mentality.

Axel Honneth’s work Das Recht der Freiheit - Grundriss einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (2011) is an original attempt at a synthesis: you can read it as a classical work on political philosophy and as a program of a renewal of a critical social theory. Since he wrote the book, he has held lectures about the philosophy of social freedom in connection with some basic ideas of the book. The investigation of these lectures makes it possible for us to focus more on the book’s philosophical profile and analyze it in the context of the classical philosophical tradition. In my study, I give an outline of this political-philosophical profile when I reconstruct the thread of thought with which Honneth works out the theory of “social freedom.” According to my presumption, we can see the emergence of a political philosopher who reconsiders the arguments of classical political philosophers in a very innovative way. At the same time, some weaknesses of Honneth’s synthesis can be pointed out while reconstructing his theory. By approaching classical philosophical tradition, Honneth contradicts the program from which he hopes to gain the renewal of a critical theory based on “dialogue” and social analysis. In this study, I will compare Axel Honneth’s critical social theory as it is outlined in this work with his critical assumptions as they unfold in his earlier works. I also critique, from the perspective of the unfolding thought process, Honneth’s analysis of social pathologies in relation to the concept of “law” and the concept of “negative freedom”.

The research deals with the phenomenon of gray zones on the example of military and economic-legal spheres using the systemic-communicative approach, arising on the basis of Niklas Luman’s social theory. The author analyzes the nature of gray zones, their historical evolution and contemporary significance in the conditions of globalization and technological progress. It is argued that gray zones often serve as catalysts of social change and require a comprehensive approach to understand and regulate them. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt has been made to semantically unify the concept of “gray zone” through the prism of Luhmann’s systemic-communicative theory, with the justification of the possibility of its application in different functional systems of society. The author argues that gray hones represent areas of uncertainty, namely, aggregates of heterogeneous communications that do not participate in the reproduction (autopoiesis) of social systems. Relying on the systemic-communicative approach, the gray zone can be seen as something that a social system cannot interpret in the logic of its own communications. The author emphasizes the importance of systems analysis for identifying structural and functional problems associated with gray zones and suggests methods for their investigation and classification. Also discussed are ways in which a systems-communicative approach can be used to better understand the complex interactions between different social systems are also discussed. It is concluded that unifying the concept of the gray zone facilitates more effective communication and cooperation between specialists from different fields, and improves the development of policies and educational programs.

The review is devoted to the first volume of Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein’s works from the planned three-volume collection of his works; the main purpose of the publication is to establish the idea of the philosopher’s work as a single path based on the interaction of philosophy and psychology in the development of basic problems related to human understanding. The creative path of a thinker confirms the need to work in the field of philosophical foundations of science, since the logic of any field of knowledge, whether pedagogy or psychology, is set from the outside. Historically, the question of the role of the body and the psyche, their interrelation in human life, was solved by psychologists, philosophers and physiologists in the 20th century.