The Faculty of Humanities was created on December 1, 2014. It trains instructors and researchers in the field of language and literature, as well as specialists in philosophy, history, and modern culture.
The main goal of the faculty is to teach students how to understand and analyse various cultural processes, employ current research strategies, and effectively put their knowledge into practice.
The faculty’s staff are leading Russian academics and practitioners from various cultural fields, as well as invited foreign specialists. Students receive a modern education in the humanities, as well as thorough language preparation, which allows them to find extensive professional opportunities upon graduation. Students are given the opportunity to conduct research and gain practical experience at major private and public establishments.
Our strengths:
1. Interdisciplinary approach
We study the humanities alongside other academic fields so that students can apply their skills in various areas.
2. International cooperation
We maintain active international ties, which allows students to undertake internships and study abroad, as well as broaden their outlook and cultural experiences.
3. Research
We encourage and support student participation in research projects. This gives them an opportunity to apply their knowledge in practice and make a contribution to the development of the humanities.
Our graduates pursue careers in public and commercial organisations and various types of mass media. They also implement their own media, cultural, social, and educational projects.
Publications
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Book
Problem Solving in Philosophy. How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent AI
This open access book provides a method for philosophical problem solving, offering philosophers the tools to stay ahead of machine intelligence. Louis Vervoort argues that, with ultra-intelligent AI knocking at the door, philosophy can no longer rely solely on its ancient methodological toolkit. The proposed method is essentially the same as used in natural science, theoretical physics in particular, and aims at solving problems through theory-synthesis. The author shows by first case studies that current AI can already assist us in this task – a trend that will surely strengthen in the near future. After explaining the method in detail, the book proceeds by proposing unified solutions to classic problems of (analytic) philosophy, such as Gettier’s problem, the problem of induction, of causation, of the interpretation of probability, of free will. The author argues that these solutions maximise a quantitative measure of solidity, and that philosophy can now reach standards of certainty that are comparable to those of natural science. The book is written for professional philosophers, but avoids jargon, so it should also be accessible to laypeople and scientists.
Springer, 2026.
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Article
PULM-UP in Russian Sign Language
This study examines the form, function, and linguistic status of PALM-UP in Russian Sign Language (RSL), revealing a unified discursive mechanism underlying its seemingly diverse functions. Analysis of its occurrences in spontaneous narratives demonstrates that all PALM-UP uses share the core metaphor of “information as an object placed on an open palm”. The form occurs in two primary spatial configurations: a lateral variant tied to the signer’s egocentric space (e.g., expressing opinions or lack of knowledge) and a presenting variant oriented toward communicative space (e.g., addressing the interlocutor or introducing referents). PALM-UP in RSL narratives exhibits variable syntactic behaviordepending on contextual conditions, particularly the ability to form independent discourse units(paraclausal or regulatory). Certain non-manual markers accompanying PALM-UP and their combinations(eyebrow and eye movements, head/body shifts) show systematic correlations with its pragmaticfunctions, while lip configuration (tight and stretched) appears to be an obligatory component ofPALM-UP’s inherent structure. The analysis further demonstrates that PALM-UP in RSL has the linguisticstatus of a sign (rather than a gesture), albeit a special one: it functions similarly to discourse markers in spoken languages.
Voprosy Jazykoznanija. 2026. No. 2. P. 44-76.
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Book chapter
Ancient Greek Polis: From Homoarchy to Heterarchy and Back Again
The chapter considers the historical development of the Ancient Greek city-state (polis) viewed through the categories of homoarchy and heterarchy basic for the present monography. The author traces its formation on the base of the homoarchical society of the Dark Ages, the peculiarities of its heterarchical structure, the background of its crise in the 4th century B.C.
In bk.: Principles and Forms of Sociocultural Organization: Historical Contexts of Interaction. L.; NY: Anthem Press, 2026. Ch. 2. P. 33-52.
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Working paper
An Annotation Scheme and Classifier for Personal Facts in Dialogue
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled their application in personalized dialogue systems. We present an extended annotation scheme for personal fact classification that addresses limitations in existing approaches, particularly PeaCoK. Our scheme introduces new categories (Demographics, Possessions) and attributes (Duration, Validity, Followup) that enable structured storage, quality filtering, and identification of facts suitable for dialogue continuation. We manually annotated 2,779 facts from Multi-Session Chat and trained a multi-head classifier based on transformer encoders. Combined with the Gemma-300M encoder, the classifier achieves 81.6±2.6\% macro F1, outperforming all few-shot LLM baselines (best: GPT-5.4-mini, 72.92\%) by nearly 9 percentage points while requiring substantially fewer computational resources. Error analysis reveals persistent challenges in semantic boundary disambiguation, temporal aspect interpretation, and pragmatic reasoning for followup assessment. The dataset\footnotemark[1] and classifier\footnotemark[2] are publicly available.arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2026