Asimov’s laws of robotics provide rare common ground, a kind of commandments for all sides of ethical discourse on artificial intelligence. Practical implementation of these «laws», however, faces fundamental problems which are studied in this work. In particular, the first «law» on the prevention of harm to humans does not specify, the harm to whom is meant; the second «law» on the subordination of a robot to a human does not specify, which of the subjects willing to control this robot must be preferred. Elementary examples show that with ubiquitous conflicts of interest, both these abstractly-humanistic laws are untenable. Even in the absence of such conflicts, the «prevention of harm» requires a robot to foresee the consequences of certain actions in the arbitrarily distant future, which contradicts the laws of physics and biology. Finally, it is shown that formulations of all three laws, obviously ridiculous in application to inanimate instruments, assume that robots have freedom of action, fallaciously endowing them with subjectness. Such misplaced anthropomorphism, typical for the ongoing discussions of artificial intelligence, has a foothold in stable language forms. A bundle of the revealed fallacies makes up an erroneous conceptual system, threatening social security in transition to future technological lifestyles.

The presented article examines the philosophical foundations of the visual turn in historical science. The author examines the influence of this phenomenon on the transformation of historical methodology and research approaches through the prism of research on cult architecture. The visual turn, as shown in the article, plays one of the key roles in the formation of new paradigms of historical knowledge, which is expressed both in the integration of visual sources and in the construction and adaptation of new methods and approaches in modern historiography.

Currently, more and more researchers in the field of philosophy emphasize that modern society is narcissistic. It is generally accepted that such transformation of society occurred after the Second World War, when the average person became disillusioned with the ideals of modernism and withdrew into himself, not wanting to participate more actively in public life. The prevalence of such life strategy allowed us to call the modern era narcissistic. However, looking at previous times, we can see that such a transformation of man began even before the forties of the twentieth century and the foundation of such social order was laid at the beginning of the last century. Having familiarized ourselves with the works of philosophers of those times, it becomes clear that the basis of such society is mass character, the growth of which was actively written about in the twentieth century. This article attempts to demonstrate the influence of mass society on the emergence of narcissism. The work describes the characteristics of mass character, demonstrating that it was precisely this social order that could become the foundation on which the narcissistic society described in the works of modern philosophers would be built in the future.

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the main problems of postcolonial discourse. Key theories such as postcolonialism, decolonization of thought and orientalism are considered, as well as other concepts related to this area of research. The main contradictions of postcolonial theory are analyzed and the role and place of postcolonialism in the modern world are determined. It is shown that at this historical stage, postcolonialism is trying to go beyond the bounds of biased knowledge and offer the world a certain model of behavior to overcome the differences between «centers» and «periphery», but so far the direction of this work is rather engaged in recording injustices in societies. To destroy this established attitude to postcolonialism and to provide practical methods of combating inequality are the main tasks of postcolonial researchers.

The article examines the phenomenon of a «smart city» from the point of view of the objective need for the modern process of digital transformation of the urban environment, as well as a kind of urban metaphor that determines our attitude to this process. In turn, the concept of metaphor is analyzed within the framework of classical, philosophical and urban discourses. In this vein, the relevance of applying the definition of «smart» to a city is considered, and examples of successfully implemented «smart city» projects are given. Digitalization of cities is an inevitable process of their development. Cities will not be able to provide comfortable living for the population, and, accordingly, withstand competition with each other, if they do not begin to implement modern digital technologies. In our country, the federal project «Smart City» was developed to improve housing and communal services, education, urban development and other spheres, which literally forces cities to develop. Nevertheless, the question arises about the independence of the process of urban digitalization – is a smart city a metaphor or reality? We believe that Christopher Alexander’s classic metaphor of the «tree city» is still relevant because both the contradictions of the human, institutional and technological dimensions, which seem particularly relevant in our time, and the supposed logic of their algorithmic representation belong to the same archetype.

The concept of context is considered, which, along with the concepts of reality and normativity, is the central concept of contextual realism. Th  relations between contextuality, normativity, conceptuality and nonpredeterminacy, between the concepts of context and relevant (implicit) knowledge are established. Examples of contextuality are given, in particular, in quantum mechanics. It is shown that contextuality is an antidote against relativism. A critique of epistemological correlationism is offered from the point of view of contextual realism. The question of criteria of existence/reality is considered.