Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Костелянец С. В.

  BRICS and Climate Change: Balancing National Interests, National Development Goals and Global Environmental Sustainability

  This book delves into the intricate interplay between climate change and the dynamic shifts in global power structures, focusing on the expanded BRICS. Offering a distinctive vantage point by encapsulating the evolving dynamics of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the book through this unique perspective, sheds light on the nuanced relationship between environmental challenges and the geopolitical landscape. It has an interdisciplinary approach, seamlessly weaving insights from political science, economics, development studies, and the natural sciences. This holistic integration of diverse disciplines enhances the reader's understanding, presenting a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted issues at the nexus of climate change and global politics. It not only maps out the current climate crisis confronting humanity in the twenty-first century, but also extends a helping hand to policymakers. The inclusion of pragmatic policy recommendations adds a pragmatic dimension, providing valuable insights that policymakers may find instrumental in addressing the challenges posed by climate change.

  Singapore: Springer, 2024.

• Article

  Tumanova A. S., Safonov A. A.

  Pavel Novgorodtsev’s Philosophy of Law: New Liberalism vs Christian Humanism

  The paper characterizes the contribution made by Pavel Novgorodtsev, the Russian philosopher of law, to the establishment of the moral and ethical tradition of law, which, in turn, is the philosophical foundation of the doctrine of new liberalism and human rights. This tradition was influential both in late-imperial Russia and in Europe where Novgorodtsev emigrated in 1920 and where he founded the Institute (Faculty) of Law at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic). The authors consider Novgorodtsev’s legal philosophy as an integral ethical doctrine, taking into account its development in the last period of the scholar’s life. For the first time in the academic literature, it is argued that Novgorodtsev’s views should be interpreted in the context of both the liberal and religious philosophical approaches to the understanding law, and that these approaches complement each other and haveg played a significant role in the history of political and legal thought both in Russia and in the 20th-century Europe. Novgorodtsev’s contribution to intellectual thought in Russia and Europe was in his thoroughgoing criticism of social utopias, particularly, Bolshevism and Communism, which were characterized by their denial of law and legal tradition. The research is based on a wide range of sources, including Novgorodtsev’s papers and personal documents.

  Russian Sociological Review. 2024. Vol. 24. No. 4.

• Book chapter

  Litvina A., Uspenskij F.

  The Sovereign’s Two Names (Potapii Maksimovich the Grandson of Matvei, or Vasilii Ivanovich Shuiskii)

  The strange and eclectic phenomenon of polynomy, whereby a single person can possess quite a list of given names, is very characteristic of Rus society throughout the medieval era. Particularly striking is the complexity of the functional load that individual components of this polynomy may carry, combined with their apparent optionality. In the twelfth century just as well as the seventeenth, a person could have gone under one and the same personal name for their whole life or else accumulated three, four, or even five names. Some names were given at birth and some only in later years. In general, newly acquired names would not cancel out earlier ones: not infrequently, all would remain integral attributes of their bearer until death and sometimes have at least a degree of posthumous significance as well. A man who had taken monastic vows and therefore acquired a new name (e.g., Lavrentii, ‘Lawrence’) could in his daily monastic life use another, totally un-ecclesiastical name (e.g., Deviatoi, ‘the Ninth’). He would sign documents with a third name—the public Christian name under which he was known in his previous secular life (e.g, Feodor, ‘Theodor’), and still celebrate his name-day according to his fourth name, the baptismal one (e.g., Leontii). However, these names would hardly ever occur together in the same communicative situation and would only sporadically appear together within the same written text.

  In bk.: Enigma in Rus and Medieval Slavic Cultures. De Gruyter, 2024. Ch. 17. P. 349-361.

• Working paper

  Konstantin Zaitsev.

  Exploring the Effectiveness of Methods for Persona Extraction

  The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024