This edited volume, aimed at both students and researchers in philosophy, mathematics and history of science, highlights leading developments in the overlapping areas of philosophy and the history of modern mathematics. It is a coherent, wide ranging account of how a number of topics in the philosophy of mathematics must be reconsidered in the light of the latest historical research, and how a number of historical accounts can be deepened by embracing philosophical questions.

Every time we work on this Yearbook, we are focused on making at least a small step forward to gradual elaboration of a megaevolutionary paradigm which is designed to create a united scientific field for cross-disciplinary studies. The present volume is the seventh issue of the ‘Evolution’ Yearbook series. Our Yearbooks are designed to present to its readers the widest possible spectrum of subjects and issues: from universal evolutionism to the analysis of particular evolutionary regularities in the development of biological, abiotic, and social systems, culture, cognition, language, etc. The main objective of our Yearbook is the creation of a unified interdisciplinary field of research, within which scientists specializing in different disciplines could work within the framework of unified or similar paradigms, using common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. Global evolution (in connection with the Big History) becomes the main subject of our Yearbook. We strive to arrange each issue in such a way that the line from cosmic evolution to the human future is evident. The title of this issue Evolutionary Aspects: Stars, Primates, and Religion is fully justified. The volume consists of three sections: ‘Megaevolution and Cosmic Evolution’; ‘Biosocial and Social Evolution’; ‘Reviews and Notes’. This Yearbook will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Cosmology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Economics and other areas of study. More than that, this edition will challenge and excite your vision of your own life and the new discoveries going on around us.

Young researchers, natural advocates of change, often delve freely into language processes, their causes, mechanisms and interrelations with social changes. However, any change is based on tradition and cannot exist without it, whether we speak of traditions in terminology, approach, data or method. This volume brings together young scholars from Russia, Poland, Spain, Pakistan, Thailand and Ukraine, and is based on papers presented at the Second International Young Scholars Conference, titled “Lexicon, Discourse and Speaker Studies”, held in Ulyanovsk, Russia, in 2014. It showcases current research into linguistic tradition and change in a variety of contexts across the globe, and is divided into four sections, each of which embraces one specific sphere of language studies. About half of the papers included in the volume are written by Russian authors, and in this respect the volume represents a concise collage of linguistic research in the country, shedding light on some major trends of research and demonstrating explicitly that Russian linguistics is not developing in isolation from other cultural contexts. This book will be of particular interest to researchers, postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates working in the fields of discourse analysis, linguistics, and language acquisition.

This book presents a new approach to the epistemology of mathematics by viewing mathematics as a human activity whose knowledge is intimately linked with practice. Charting an exciting new direction in the philosophy of mathematics, José Ferreirós uses the crucial idea of a continuum to provide an account of the development of mathematical knowledge that reflects the actual experience of doing math and makes sense of the perceived objectivity of mathematical results. Describing a historically oriented, agent-based philosophy of mathematics, Ferreirós shows how the mathematical tradition evolved from Euclidean geometry to the real numbers and set-theoretic structures. He argues for the need to take into account a whole web of mathematical and other practices that are learned and linked by agents, and whose interplay acts as a constraint. Ferreirós demonstrates how advanced mathematics, far from being a priori, is based on hypotheses, in contrast to elementary math, which has strong cognitive and practical roots and therefore enjoys certainty. Offering a wealth of philosophical and historical insights, Mathematical Knowledge and the Interplay of Practices challenges us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about mathematics, its objectivity, and its relationship to culture and science.

Desde la perspectiva sociológica, el concepto de tecnología no puede referirse únicamente a los objetos técnicos, sino también a los procesos sociales y culturales que involucra. La sociocibernética y la teoría de sistemas plantean un marco conceptual esencial para el necesario debate sobre el papel de la tecnología en la configuración de la complejidad social. La tecnología permite al sistema social gestionar la complejidad social. La tecnología permite al sistema social gestionar la complejidad de su entorno a la vez que, por otra parte, contribuye a incrementar y diversificar la naturaleza compleja de las interdependencias entre la sociedad y los actores individuales. Simultáneamente, la creciente complejidad social demanda nuevas formas tecnológicas que permitan gestionarla. En suma, la tecnología se halla en la base de cualquier discusión relevante sobre la naturaleza contemporánea de la sociedad, ya sea del lado de los problemas (riesgo, control, y vigilancia global, bioética y bioingeniería, manipulación mediática, ecológica etc.) o del lado de las soluciones (comunicaciones instantáneas, ubicuidad y movilidad, accesibilidad, disponibilidad de conocimiento, etc.).