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3/7 – Leadership Quotes from Alexander Chizhevsky and Alexander Malakhov

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We are accustomed to holding a gross and narrow anti-philosophical view on life as a result of random play of only Earth-bound forces. This is, most certainly, wrong. Life as we see now is, to a far greater extent, a cosmic phenomenon, rather than only Earth-based. It was created by the influence of creative dynamics of cosmos onto inert material of Earth. It lives through the dynamics of those forces, and each and every beat of this organic pulsation is aligned with the pulse of the Cosmic Heart—this grandiose totality of nebulae, stars, the Sun, and the planets.

Alexander Chizhevsky, The Terrestrial Echo of Solar Storms (originally published in French under the title Les Epidemies et les perturbations electro-magnetiques du milieu exterieur [Paris, 1938]; the quotation translated from Russian by Eugene Pustoshkin)

ЧИЖЕВСКИЙ Александр Леонидович chizhevskiy-02022009033709Zof

Today, scholars and scientists, when they begin their research, find themselves in a more auspicious situation than any previous generation. It is not just that we witness an unprecedented expansion in our capacities for communication, democratization of knowledge or continuous improvement of scientific methods. In a subtler sense, the new generation of scholars is immune—or, at least, has no justifiable reason not to have such an immunity—towards self-confident illusions of modernist science and excessive postmodern relativism. Reality, including social one, no longer seems to be eternally existing decorations which permit only passive observation nor it is a meaningless chaos which disarms and frustrates mind. In a striking—and also quite reasonable—way the discovery that the complexity of the world transcends all known limits, and that it can be perceived through an unlimited number of perspectives, brings forth in us confidence that it is quite in our power to find genuine meaning and acquire valid knowledge without ignoring epistemological limitations that are inherent to our species.

— Alexander Malakhov, “A Possibility of Integral Sociology” (the quotation translated from Russian by E. Pustoshkin)

(Malakhov, A. V. A Possibility of Integral Sociology: Preliminary Observations [in Russian]. Theory and Practice of Social Development: International Scientific Journal. 2016. No 2.)

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