A Few Words About Bibler’s Dialogics

A Few Words About Bibler’s Dialogics
The School of the Dialogue of Cultures Conception and Curriculum
(на русском языке эту статью можно прочесть здесь - Несколько слов о библеровской диалогике, концепции Школы диалога культур и ее Программе)
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English translation © 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text: Irina Berlyand, “Neskol’ko slov o biblerovskoi dialogike, kontseptsii Shkoly dialoga kul’tur i ee Programme.”
Irina E. Berlyand has worked at Moscow’s Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology, where she became acquainted with V.S. Bibler. In 1991 she began working in Bibler’s Dialogue of Cultures group, which, until 1994, was sponsored by the Kemerovo entrepreneur I. Panchishin and later became a research group at the Russian State University for the Humanities, School of Philosophy. She is primarily interested in the phenomena of culture as an object of study in early education (as envisioned within Bibler’s School of the Dialogue of Cultures concept). Her most important publications include Play as a Phenomenon of Consciousness [Igra kak fenomen soznaniia] (Kemerovo, 1992) and Puzzles of the Number [Zagadki chisla] (Moscow, 1996), as well as Bibler’s Zamysly [Conceptions], which was published posthumously and on which she worked with A. Akhutin. E-mail: iberlyand@gmail.com.
Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov.
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caλεπατа καλα
[That which is beautiful is difficult.]¹

Every pedagogical conception is founded on certain general premises (although they may not always be overtly expressed) — notions about the nature of man and society, how knowledge is set up, what it means to teach, and so on. The School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) overtly and consciously relies on a specific philosophical conception that brings these questions up to their utmost logical sharpness. It is significant that V.S. Bibler starts his conversation about the contemporary school with the question “What kind of reason [razum]^* is vital now?” The School of the Dialogue of Cultures must be understood not just instrumentally, as a set of pedagogical tools or as one particular variety of “dialogic teaching,” but rather as a projection into education of Bibler’s holistic philosophical conception. Before reading Bibler’s text, the reader should be introduced to Bibler himself, to the sense of his philosophical conception, to his role in founding the School of the Dialogue of Cultures, and to the history of the text itself.
Vladimir Solomonovich Bibler (1918–2000) was a philosopher and the author of dialogics — the idea of the logic of the dialogue between cultures. Having started his career in philosophy as a Marxist striving to resurrect the “true” Marx, free of the distortions of official Soviet dogma, Bibler created a completely original conception of philosophical logic based on the idea of the dialogic nature of human reason (cf. Bakhtin), an idea that is pursued to its ultimate logical foundations.² Unlike the philosophy of the New Time (the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel), which saw itself as Wissenschaftslehre,³ as a substantiation of cognizing reason, twentieth-century philosophy, as Bibler saw it, became a philosophy of culture that provided a logical basis on which culture (not just science) would be able to substantiate itself.^** A majority of Russian historians have accepted the following periodization of World and, in particular, European history: Ancient history (Antiquity, for Europe) [antichnost’], the Middle Ages [srednie veka], the New Time [novoe vremia], the Newest Time [noveishee vremia]. Bibler used this periodization

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^*The Russian word razum is similar to German Vernunft, Latin Intellectus, Greek νούς.—I.B.
^**“New Time” is a translation of “Novoe vremia.” Russian and Western periodizations do not match perfectly, so there is no perfect translation of this term. The Early Modern period is generally seen as ending with the Industrial Revolution, in the late eighteenth century. — Trans.

of history when he discussed the historical cultures of Europe. However, his main focus was the definition of the cultural unity of each historical culture. Here and below Antiquity is used for the Greco-Roman culture of antiquity (approximately from the sixth century b.c.e. to the third century c.e.); Middle Ages culture — for European culture between the fourth and fifteenth centuries c.e.; and New Time — mainly for European culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It ended at the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of a crisis in the basis of the science, the avant-garde movement in art, the social sciences, world political, and social crises (i.e., the Newest Time began). (Of course, this chronology is rather approximate and relative because these historical cultures have been defined and constructed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in dialogue with other historical cultures.) Culture can substantiate itself only by going beyond its own boundaries, at the edge, in dialogue with another culture.⁴ In this dialogue it can be understood as the particular-universal,⁵ as a unique logic (unlike Hegel, Bibler provides a convincing argument for the possibility of different logics), as an entire comprehending subject with a reason of its own.
Every culture, according to Bibler, creates its own universally particular Reason.⁶ Bibler described (reconstructed) the types of Reason that were typical for the cultures that existed over the course of European history: Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the New Time. These different reasons, different logics, cannot be generalized or understood as different aspects or stages of a single universal; each of them realizes its own, particular (but also universal) means of understanding. So for Antiquity to comprehend a subject (meaning anything, a material object or a human being or a notion of the world) meant to comprehend chaos as cosmos, to define it [i.e., “to de-fine” etymologically and morphologically means finding the limits or form of something, see the Oxford English Dictionary —Eds.], presenting it as an inner ideal form (eidos).
In Medieval European culture, comprehending something meant comprehending it in its communion with the universal Subject. For the cognizing reason of the New Time, comprehending a subject meant cognizing its essence, as it is in itself. The eidetic, ordering reason of Antiquity, the communing reason of the Middle Ages, the cognizing reason of the New Time are not seen as being built one after the other on the ladder of progress and sublating within themselves the achievements of preceding types of reason, but as existing simultaneously and vital to one another, like partners in dialogue.⁷ Cultures relate to one another not through Hegel’s sublation, but through dialogue. Within this dialogue, culture, in answer to the questions of another culture, reveals meanings and potentials that were unknown to it in its actual historical existence. Contemporary reason is dialogic reason, adjoining other reasons.⁸
Bibler’s own vital interlocutors were in particular, Hegel and Bakhtin. His primary argument with Hegel concerned dialectics and dialogics; Bibler’s primary discovery was that several equally universal logics could coexist. His primary argument with Bakhtin concerned the idea that culture in “the ultimate questions of being” comes to the universality of logic and presumes a subject capable of comprehending and substantiating it from the outside, as possible (and not just accept it as a given). Bakhtin, as is well known, believed that logic by definition is exceptionally monologic — the exemplary logic for him was Hegel’s. Bibler insisted that logic is dialogic, and only within the sphere of logic is genuine dialogue possible — and only within such dialogue does culture become culture. This argument (the argument with Hegel, the argument with Bakhtin, and Bakhtin’s argument with Hegel within Bibler’s own theory) is constantly reproduced by Bibler and constitutes the primary sense of his dialogics. This argument takes on special meaning within the SDC when it is applied to the idea of education.⁹
Every philosophical conception tries to “test” itself on the idea of education. Philosophy deals with the beginning — the beginning of knowledge, of culture, of a human being — which means, it deals with a situation where none of this yet exists, where everything is merely a possibility, is just being conceived — and this is the situation of education. Therefore the concept of education turns out to be a sort of test, an experimentum crucis for a philosophical concept. Many philosophers have created their own integral theories of education; almost all of them have addressed this problem one way or another. Bibler was no exception.
In the spring of 1976, Bibler presented a series of talks at the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences’ Institute of Educational Content and Methods titled “Oh, What a Cultivated [vospitannii], Educated, Enlightened, Cultured Person! . . . (Concerning the Historical, Personality, and Pedagogical Contention Involving These Designations).”¹⁰ In these talks, Bibler demonstrated that the concepts of enlightenment, cultivation, and education, which are often used synonymously, have a complex, contradictory, and contentious relationship to one another that borders on out-and-out antagonism and that each of these concepts are based on specific perspectives on the pedagogical process—the formation of a person who is well-brought-up, enlightened, or educated, as the case may be.^11*** All of these ideas are founded on specific philosophical premises that were subjected to fresh analysis with every twist and turn of New Time philosophy. Bibler studied these ideas in depth and demonstrated the clash and contention between them on the basis of specific writings, selecting for his analysis certain works that reflect and interpret these ideas completely and fully: Rousseau’s Emile: Or on Education (cultivation), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (education), and works by Kant and Diderot (enlightenment). The idea of a person of culture, distinct from the idea of an educated person, was first formulated (using Bakhtin as a foundation) as an idea vital to contemporary society and in keeping with the idea of a contemporary dialogic reason distinct from New Time cognizing reason. Within a person of culture, other pedagogical ideas (cultivation, etc.) are not sublated, but are dialogically joined.
Thus the idea of a person of culture came about as a new — relative to the idea of a person of education — “regulative idea” for the school.¹² What was being contemplated was a change to the very concept of the school, a new understanding of the most fundamental

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^***In Russian prosveshchenie, vospitanie, and obrazovanie. Vospitanie [cultivation] has no English equivalent and Russian–English dictionary definitions include education, “upbringing,” “cultivation,” “fostering,” “rearing,” and “training.” This is the word Russian uses to translate the title of Rousseau’s Emile: Or on Education (Emile ou de l’education). The term translated as “education” — obrazovanie — is the Russian word most closely associated with academic education. In various contexts, all three of these words might be translated into English as “education.” — Trans.

questions: what should be taught, why should it be taught, how should it be taught, and what, after all, does it mean to teach? How, in a changing world, were we to understand the relationships between teacher and pupil, education and cultivation, and the object and method of instruction? And so on and so forth.
When Bibler first started working on these problems, he was not particularly interested in social or pedagogical experiments. What was of interest to him was a thought experiment, making sense of the ideas of culture and education within the context of the new logic.
At approximately the same time or a little later, a number of schoolteachers in Kharkov (S. Kurganov, V. Litovsky, and some others) began conducting educational dialogues in a number of classes involving a number of academic subjects. What drove their work was a desire to design lessons that would not only allow pupils to acquire an anonymous “culture,” packaged in such a way to make acquisition easier and speaking through the authoritative (if not authoritarian) voice of the Teacher and the Textbook, but would also develop their own personal, individually unique thinking. In these lessons, the pupil and the teacher are both (in a certain sense) fully equal participants in the discussion.¹³ The need for a new way to teach was born out of pedagogical practice itself. Familiarity with Bibler’s book Thinking as Creativity [Myshlenie kak tvorchestvo] and later with his other works and with the man himself helped educators to see the regularities they uncovered as a manifestation of the universal cultural situation of the twentieth century, to understand the logical sense of their work, and to see that the dialogism of teaching is associated not only with the particular features of how the teaching process is organized but also with the very content of education. At the very end of the 1970s, a collective of Kharkov teachers under Bibler’s leadership began to systematically develop and experimentally introduce dialogue lessons into Kharkov schools.¹⁴ Bibler himself, impressed by the work of the teachers using dialogue, had the idea of joining with them to develop a holistic conception of a new school and a curriculum for that school. There was a sense that an important meeting was taking place here.
Bibler named his conception the “School of the Dialogue of Cultures.”
Within this name the words dialogue and culture have very specific meanings (although, while they have been radically rethought, these meanings are not completely divorced from the “everyday,” commonly accepted meanings). I bring this up again because it is exceptionally important to a correct understanding of the conception.
In Bibler’s conception, culture is a completely distinct phenomenon of a person’s spiritual life that is vital specifically now and that in Bibler’s works¹⁵ involves the following turns of comprehension:
• Culture is a way of the individual’s self-determination that overcomes the individual’s determination from the outside. As a phenomenon of human life, culture is founded on people’s ability to direct their own activities and to change themselves, on their freedom in relation to their activity, and on their responsibility for such activity. In such facets of culture as art, philosophy, theory, and morality, a human being — the author and the reader of products of culture, as well as of one’s own responsible deeds — is not the result or product of outside forces and laws, but the individual capable of responsibly bringing him/herself up into being.
• Culture is the creation of the world for the first time on the margins of barbarism. Unlike civilization, which continues and is continued, culture is born anew each time (it reproduces its own nonexistence within itself, it reproduces the situation of its birth “out of nothing,” out of nonculture — and in so doing draws the “precultural,” barbaric principle into the sphere of culture).
• Culture is a form of communication between cultures (civilization in the form of culture goes to the boundary with another culture and only then arises as culture).¹⁶
As Bibler understands it, within the conception of the SDC, dialogue is not just communication between two or more people about anything at all or a means of organizing instruction or the acquisition of knowledge. Dialogue is the way in which culture exists, contemporary knowledge exists, and the very content of teaching (i.e., curriculum) exists — not just the methods and techniques of teaching. The contemporary concept itself is constructed dialogically (i.e., paradoxically) — this is not just the way in which it is presented or acquired. Dialogue is the revelation of paradoxality, of an unsealable crack in the very matter of dispute and in my very thought about this matter. Those presenting other viewpoints must not only be heard from the outside and contested, but reproduced inside me as indestructible voices, whose arguments I can reproduce as my own in inner speech [vnutrenniaia rech’, see Vygotsky], more profoundly and seriously than what I hear from without. This is a dialogue of radically different universals, different logics, different cultures. In its full form, such dialogue is hardly possible in the classroom, but it is a regulative idea for the structuring of academic content and the organization of the learning process in school.¹⁷ This must always be kept in mind while reading Bibler’s text. Otherwise, the SDC might be seen as a type of “dialogue teaching” that is common now, where dialogue is understood primarily as a pedagogic means of conveying knowledge, of organizing communication, but one in which educational content (i.e., curriculum) remains monologic.¹⁸
In 1987 Bibler presented his ideas in a series of talks titled “Dialogue of Cultures and the Twenty-first Century School” at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology in Moscow, where he was working at the time and headed a Dialogue of Cultures group. The talks were a success and sparked heated discussion that included a great deal of criticism and a great deal of approval. It is difficult to say how deeply the audience understood their philosophical and logical meaning. But the appeal for a fundamental renewal of the very idea of school was well accepted — it harmonized well with the current mood of the researchers and pedagogues. The orientation toward “dialogism” was also well-received due to interest in the works of Bakhtin. It also fit right in because it was seen as a “humanitarizing of education.”
Here I will make a small digression. Beginning in the late 1950s, a debate between “physicists and lyricists” was taking place within Soviet society. In the 1960s the physicists clearly held the advantage in terms of prestige (they were building the bomb, launching spaceships, carrying out a scientific and technical revolution, and generally endowing the state with power and prestige).
Physicists get adulation,
Lyricists are shown their flaws.
Due to more than calculation,
Due to universal laws.
Seems we failed by not providing,
Insights that were sought from us.
Seems our winged words were riding
Wings that lacked the proper thrust.
Pegasus is not an option,
So our gallop hardly awes . . .
Physicists get adulation,
Lyricists are shown their flaws.
No use whining, we admit it.
No hard feelings, not a bit,
Fascinated, here we sit
Looking on, engrossed in it,
Seeing how our rhymes and rhythms,
Once so mightily revered,
Cede esteem to logarithms,
Fizzle out, and disappear.
—Boris Slutsky, 1959
In the 1980s, public opinion began to incline toward the lyricists. There was talk of a need to humanitarize education. But the ideas were rather simplistic — a reduction in the role of the natural sciences and a broadening of the scope and an increase in the volume and significance of instruction in the humanities — history, literature, world culture, and art history. Some had more “radical” ideas and talked about shifting the center of gravity away from education (understood to include the study of science) toward moral cultivation [nravstvennoe vospitanie] and aesthetic development.
Bibler envisioned a completely different “humanitarization.” Morality, art, theory (science) form a unity (not identicalness! but a “dialogic unity”) within the entirety of culture, and neither tragedy nor Pythagorean mathematics can be excluded if the culture of Antiquity is to be comprehended as a culture, just as the culture of the New Time cannot be comprehended as a culture without science or the European novel. Science (physics, mathematics, etc.) must not be “cut back” and shoved into the background in the new school, but they must be seen as an essential aspect of culture. The “majesty of logarithms” is seen in a whole new way when the humanitarian meaning of mathematics is grasped.
During these same years, our group, headed by Bibler, began to conduct conferences with the involvement of schoolteachers.¹⁹ A number of them were wildly and genuinely — and at times, it seemed, inordinately — enthusiastic about this conception. The breadth and ardor of the reaction of many dozens of pedagogues was truly amazing. Many teachers pounced on it as if it were their own, vital and long-awaited. From every corner of the country, huge numbers of teachers wrote, called, and came with questions and suggestions and seeking information about how to conduct their experimental lessons. Some were ready to immediately get to work teaching following the “SDC program” despite the lack of any organizational, financial, or methodological support whatsoever — and frequently despite local resistance — at their own risk, and overcoming tremendous difficulties. And the difficulties they faced were colossal. Bibler’s conception is so radical in its rethinking of familiar concepts that its comprehension demands tremendous effort. The language and style of Bibler’s texts and his manner of thinking is unusual. The tradition of thinking that Bibler called “high rationalism” and with which he associated himself had been lost.²⁰ Furthermore, working in accordance with the SDC approach demanded tremendous erudition. The teachers mastered ancient and medieval sources on their own, and some even began to study ancient Greek together with their pupils. Evidently, Bibler’s ideas struck a chord with the educators and turned out to be “in the zone of proximal development,” as Vygotsky would put it. They hit some kind of nerve of school life and hit it with such precision that people, without even understanding the logic behind the conception, reached out to it with hunger and rapture.
We — Vladimir Solomonovich’s friends and colleagues — were surprised by this enthusiasm, but he was not. To him, it seemed perfectly natural. He was then convinced that these ideas were “in the air,” that they corresponded to the “spirit of the time” (Zeitgeist), and that every twentieth-century thinking person, whether he or she was aware of it or not, had intuition, particular sets of problems, that relate to Bibler’s conception of dialogics. He presumed that it would be easier to awaken this intuition in schoolteachers than in academicians. Bibler got down to work. He put together a program, oversaw the work of experimental classes, held four (!) conferences per year for teachers, counseled teachers individually, attentively read and commented on work by pupils, enthusiastically received schoolteachers arriving from far and wide, spent hours talking with them, read and sorted through their texts, listened to and analyzed their ideas, which were often quite exotic and very often not well-thought-through.
This work, conducted from 1987 to 1989, provided new impetus and material for the development of this conception. On the basis of his talk and his interpretation of experimental efforts, Bibler drafted a text on the SDC consisting of two parts: “I. The Underlying Principles and Nodes of the Proposed Program”;²¹ and “II. The School of the Dialogue of Cultures’ Psychological Assumptions.” He later added yet another: “III. Notes on the School of the Dialogue of Cultures’ First- and Second-Grade Program,” but he did not manage to publish the text in the institute’s publications at the time. The few copies that were produced began to circulate in samizdat.^****
In 1992, now in the new Russia, now brought out by Aleph, a private publisher that was founded by young pedagogues engaging in entrepreneurship, the book The Foundations of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures Program [Shkola dialoga kul’tur. Osnovy programmy] was published. It included this text by Bibler with minor changes, as well as appendixes that developed in detail a variety of questions associated with issues of content, pedagogy, and psychology that arose over the course of experimental work.²²
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^**** A term used in the Soviet Union to describe the illegal circulation of texts that were retyped or otherwise copied by the authors themselves or their readers. — Eds.

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Notes
¹ An ancient proverb. It comes up in Plato’s Cratylus (384b1): “there is an ancient saying that ‘hard is the knowledge of the good” (trans. Jowet).
² See V.S. Bibler, Ot naukoucheniia — k logike kul’tury: dva filosofskhikh vvedeniia v XXI vek (Moscow, 1991), p. 413; “Kul’tura. Dialog kul’tur (Opyt opredeleniia)”, Voprosy filosofii, no. 6, 1989, pp. 31-42; Nravstevnnost’. Kul’tura. Sovremennost’ (Moscow: 1990); and “K filosofii kul’tury”, in Zamysly (Moscow, 2002).
³ Fichte’s term [generally translated into English as “the science of knowledge.” — Trans.].
⁴ Compared with Bakhtin’s assertion (1999) that culture has no internal territory.
⁵ Hegel’s term, the universal that has a particular form.
⁶ According to Bibler, every culture is multivariate and not homogeneous, but it takes the form of a unified culture through a (single) distinct reason. We talk about the culture of the Early Modern era as the culture of cognizing reason (and other cultures as well). Within itself, this culture (and other cultures) is dialogic and exists in constant dialogue between different personages. Bibler, for example, talks about such cultural personages of the New Time as the Theoretician, the Poet, the Philosopher, and the Hero (Protagonist of a novel). It is because of this internal dialogism that it can enter into dialogue with another (noncognizing) reason.
⁷ Aufheben [sublation] is a concept from Hegel’s philosophy. There is no English (or Russian) word that exactly fits German Aufheben. In German it can mean “to pick up,” “to raise,” “to keep,” “to preserve,” but also “to end,” “to abolish,” “to annul.” In Hegel’s dialectic theory of development, Aufheben is a transformation in the course of which the existing forms of phenomena are eliminated, cease to exist independently, but are preserved as subordinate aspects of a new whole. For example, you could say that classical mechanics [Newton] is present in nonclassical physics [Einstein, Heisenberg] in a sublated form — meaning that it has been negated as a universal, but could be understood as a particular instance of the new mechanics. This is how Hegel understood human history — as a process of development of the Objective Spirit, which realizes and surpasses itself, preserving the stages that have been surpassed in a sublated form. In his conception of the dialogue of cultures, Bibler asserts that in the contemporary dialogue, cultures of the historical past are reproduced not in sublated form, but as independent, nonsublated voices, valuable in their own right as logical subjects (see Bakhtin). You could say that Bibler’s conception sublates Hegel’s sublation.
⁸ Contemporary reason sees itself as dialogic. Furthermore, according to Bibler, it is specifically in contemporary reason that every reason (ancient, medieval, etc.) reveals its dialogism as the definition of reason (and not just as the circumstance of the coexistence of different mentalities).
⁹ This is why the most important interlocutor and discussant for the SDC conception is the conception of Developmental Instruction, which is based on Hegel’s logic. It is with these ideas that the most intense and significant argument reproduced within the School of the Dialogue of Cultures goes on unabated.
¹⁰ These talks were never published; the notes on which they were based provide a complete and rather detailed view of the ideas they develop. See V. S. Bibler, “Akh, kakoi vospitannyi, obrazovannyi, prosveshchennyi, kul’turnyi chelovek! . . . (Ob istoricheskom, lichnostnom, i pedagogicheskom spore etikh opredelenii),” in Zamysly (Moscow: 2002), pp. 391–446.
¹¹ The word education [obrazovanie] is meant here in the generally accepted sense, close to everyday usage—as socialization and the reproduction of mankind’s historical memory in the growing individual (child, adolescent, young man, or young woman). From here on, education is used in the sense of a particular means of such reproduction (Bildung), a sense that is reflected by Hegel and understood as universal.
¹² “Regulative idea” is a Kantian term. This notion refers to a general principle that does not have a perceptual correspondence in one’s life experience. However, this heuristic principle has the important role of orienting and focusing human learning and cognizing activity on the absolute perfectness of the ideal.
¹³ See also the Bakhtinian concepts of “authoritative discourse” and “internally persuasive discourse” (1991).
¹⁴ This pedagogical experiment is described in S.Iu. Kurganov’s book, Rebenok i vzroslyi v uchebnom dialoge (Moscow, 1989).
¹⁵ See Bibler’s works Ot naukoucheniia — k logike kul’tury: dva filosofskhikh vvedeniia v XXI vek p. 413; “Kul’tura. Dialog kul’tur (Opyt opredeleniia)”, pp. 31–42; Nravstevnnost’. Kul’tura. Sovremennost’ and “K filosofii kul’tury”.
¹⁶ In this sense Bibler is making a paradoxical assertion: “An earlier culture exists — simultaneously — later than a subsequent one, as an answer to its [the subsequent culture’s] question” (V.S. Bibler, “O logicheskoi otvetstvennosti za poniatie ‘Dialog kul’tur,’” in Na graniakh logiki i kul’tury, p. 207). It could be said, making this assertion even stronger, that historical civilizations (antiquity, the middle ages, etc.) manifested themselves as cultures only in the twentieth century, with the emergence of dialogic reason.
¹⁷ Honestly, I should admit that I know of only one explicative dialogue of this sort — Bibler’s “Eshche odin dialog Monologista s Dialogikom,” in Na graniakh logiki kul’tury, pp. 162–206.
¹⁸ For example, the textbooks of V.V. Repkin for the early grades of Developmental Instruction are written in dialogue form. However, the teaching objective is to bring the pupil to a single and monologic understanding of phonetics, orthography, and so on, and the entire flow of material is subordinate to this. Kurganov has written about this in detail in S.Iu. Kurganov, “Shestiletnie pervoklassniki,” Detskii sad so vsekh storon (September 2005), pp. 34–35.
¹⁹ Between 1988 and 1991 these conferences were held at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology (now the Russian Academy of Education’s Institute of Psychology), and beginning in 1991 they were held at the Russian State University for the Humanities.
²⁰ This tradition — the tradition of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel that is associated with substantiation of the very existence of culture, of society, of human history through reason (and not through common sense, practical necessity, and that which is sense given, etc.) — went through a major crisis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from which it has yet to recover. See Albert Schweitzer’s Culture and Ethics, chapter 1, the impulse of which Bibler shared.
²¹ The text was initially titled “Program Foundations” [Osnovy programmy].
²² This book launched a series that the publishers titled “School of the Dialogue of Cultures Books” published in 1992 and 1993. They are I.E. Berliand [Berlyand], Igra kak fenomen soznaniia; I.E. Berliand and S.Iu. Kurganov, Matematika v ShDK; idem, Programma ShDK 1–4 klass; and Shkola dialoga kul’tur. Opyt. Problemy. Perspektivy. Among planned publications that did not come out due to reasons beyond the control of the authors or publishers are Filosofsko-psikhologicheskie predpolozheniia Shkoly dialoga kul’tur (which was published much later by ROSSPEN) and S.Iu. Kurganov, Chelovek kul’tury, vols. 1–2 (not published; fragments have been included in other publications by Kurganov).