2017 Vol. 36. №4

The article considers the first of the two principles of justice proposed by the American philosopher John Rawls as universal principles that would be chosen by every reasonable and rational person in an ‘original position’. The work analyses the problematic aspects of the principle’s formulation (the vagueness of the list of key rights and freedoms and the value criterion for ranking them) and of the methods used by Rawls to overcome them in the works published after the acclaimed book A theory of Justice. The author addresses the problem of the correlation between freedom and security and argues that it was not studied sufficiently by Rawls. It is stressed that the absolute priority of the first principles of justice over the second one, which was declared by Rawls, is debatable. Disparate variations of the relative priority rule seem more convincing. The author gives a generally positive assessment of the improved formulation of the first principle of justice and emphasises that the principles of justice must take into account moral principles. Moreover, rights and freedoms should include those relating to personal and family lifestyle, childbirth and parenting and priority should be given to those freedoms that contribute to the development of the feeling of justice and the realisation of the moral ideal. It is concluded that Rawls demonstrated convincingly the relative value of democratic institutions.

This article analyses one of the recent realist interpretations of Kant — the one proposed by S. L. Katrechko. This interpretation is compared with the modern realistic understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology. Defined as cognitive-semantic, the interpretation is developed in several of S. L. Katrechko’s recent publications. According to S. L. Katrechko, Kant’s phenomenon (object) is a sign, whose referent is the thing in itself in the subjective and objective modes. The article considers two variants of the cognitive-semantic interpretation. The first one is based on Kant’s famous question as to how synthetic judgments are possible a priori. The variant defines the objective thing in itself as an empirical object that affects our sensibility. The second variant is based on the question ‘On what ground rests the relation of what we call representation in us to the object?’, as Kant put it in his letter to Herz. The subjective thing in itself is defined as a transcendental object and/or phenomenon. It is emphasised that, in a certain sense, the second variant of S. L. Katrechko’s interpretation antecedes Husserl’s phenomenology, which introduced a substantive a priori justification of human experience. This is a realist interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy. At its core is a fundamental principle of phenomenology — the validation of knowledge by a reflective examination of its premises and the everyday experience through which it is obtained. It is stressed that, unlike Kant, Husserl’s phenomenology rejects the existence of unknowable things in themselves and, unlike Katrechko, it rules out the interpretation of objects as signs. The latter makes it impossible to harmonise Husserl’s phenomenology with Katrechko’s semantic interpretation paradigm.