Oleg Timofeev

The paper is devoted to one of the actual forms of education in modern technical гniversity – essay: the peculiarities of the essay as a qualifying written work on University course «Philosophy» are described in the paper by referring to the history of the essay as a genre (Michel de Montaigne, «Experience»). Awareness of specific genre features of essay allows students to perform this type of work better, replacing it by neither composition, nor the abstract of the study. Special attention is paid to the problems of «theming» and «purity of form» of an essay.

The paper deals with the detailed analysis of the essential (invariant) characteristics of (antagonistic) personality types primarily based on up-to-date concept of cultural theorist, talented anthropologist of the twentieth century Jose Ortega y Gasset. Special attention is paid to the identification of anthropological characteristics of the individual in the phenomenology of art: the “aristocracy” in the elitist art, the “average person” in mass art. The authors view the causes of decline (traditional) culture (its washout due the processes of mass culture). They cause increasing existential angst intellectuals, theorists, concerned with the fate of modern (Western) civilization.