Documents / FOIA release
This is a CIA JPRS translation, dated 1 January 1991, of an editorial roundtable written up by V.I. Shamshurin for the Moscow journal Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya. Soviet scientists, physicians and philosophers discuss medicine and biology as sociohumanitarian sciences and the links between the natural and social sciences. One participant says public interest in parapsychology, UFOs and astrology reflects a human need for miracles during social crisis. He also criticizes parapsychology experiments and Uri Geller's performances.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 8 of 10
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rights and duties reinforced in the word and with the aid of the word-this is what we have in mind in the given instance. And this means the actions related to the social body, to politics, the economy, that is, to any concrete manifestation of human life activity and in the given instance, with biology and medicine. Certainly, the natural scientists and physicians know the ancient philosophical truth that "'a body without reason is dead.' Then we are no longer involved with biology, surgery or cardiology but rather with pathologic anatomy. Plato wrote: "'The person with a naturally healthy body who leads a healthy way of life but catches some unusual illness, for such persons and in such a state Asklepios pointed out how they should be treated: with medicines and bleeding the illness must be driven out, in maintaining, however, the ordinary way of life so that social affairs do not suffer'' ('The Republic,' 407a). Thus, what is the role of social relations in the health of man and society?
7. V.V. Semenov: In actuality in recent years, one can hear more and more often the opinion that the sociohumanitarian sciences must turn to the living man, to his problems, and not be limited to abstract cognitive limits of research or the "'somatic'" pragmatic questions. In the literature there are enough examples of such an appeal, but for now what results have we encountered? A separate area of cognition has arisen entitled "'border problems of science'" and "'common scientific problems'" and here completely different disciplines are brought together reflecting one or another aspect of human activity: political science, economics, natural scientific research and medicine. Such an association thus remains a range of disciplines which are unrelated except for the idea of man. The futility of the attempts to isolate common grounds for such diverse areas of knowledge is reflected in the problem widely discussed in methodology of the incommensurability of theories. No general concept of man is obtained nor can it be with such an approach. What one now understands by this is in essence a mechanical or even an eclectic bringing together of various disciplines. An effective general concept of man as a social individual should be provided in such a positive science as sociology in its interaction with political science, political economy and other disciplines. The specific area of research is the following. Dialectics asserts that there are no positive phenomena which do not have a negative aspect and which not only grows along with the positive but under certain conditions turns the positive into the negative, and under certain conditions this can also lead to ecological, medical-biological and then social crises and disasters. In order that this does not happen, it is essential to study the social mechanisms of crisis prevention. Such mechanisms should be found in the structures of society itself, in its social institutions as a legitimate resistance to the "'positive'" and which grows as the positive phenomenon is converted into the negative. Here Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.