The research theme is the reception of Georg Cantor's ideas in Russia. Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky have been influenced by Georg Cantor’s ideas and wrote a paper “On the symbols of infinity” in 1904. In this paper he says that transfinite mathematics of Georg Cantor is an example of symbolic vision of God. Cantor’s idea from the "Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre” is that “absolute can only be acknowledged but never known”. The absolutely infinite sequence of numbers thus seems to him to be an appropriate symbol of the absolute. Symbol, as Pavel Florensky wrote in his memoirs, was the most important concept in his philosophy throughout his life. Symbol has distinctive ontological modus of existence and its property is to be the reference for the higher being, namely God. It could also be associated with the concept of minimax by Nicolaus of Cusa. I analyze the meaning of symbol in Cantor and Florensky and juxtapose them with the understanding of the symbol by later Florensky and other interpreters. I also examine the view of theologian Christian Tapp, who researched Cantor’s interest in theology. He understands symbol as a minimal in the theory of Cantor. Johanna Van der Ween and Leon Horsten represent Cantor's conception in the context of European philosophers, whom Cantor read. The main problem of the paper is how symbol and absolute infinity could be connected and whether the meaning of symbol implies understanding of the higher being or it is not necessarily incorporated into the concept.

This paper will explore Russo-American knowledge exchange in the context of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1900-1902). This expedition was organised by the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas, and funded by the president of the American Natural History Museum, Morris K. Jesup. It involved fieldwork in both Northwest America and Northeast Siberia. For the latter, Boas employed Vladimir Jochelson and Vladimir Bogoras, two former Russian political exiles who had reinvented themselves as key international experts on the ethnography of Northeast Siberia. Jochelson and Bogoras were both working together with their wives, who did not have backgrounds in ethnography but conducted part of the research. The Russian ethnographers’ work in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition was part of a complex and challenging network of knowledge exchange. Bogoras and Jochelson were committed to the theory of social evolution which held that all human cultures passed through a universal set of stages, from the most ‘savage’ to the most ‘civilised’. On the contrary, Franz Boas was an outspoken anti-evolutionist who studied indigenous cultures through the lens of cultural relativism. Their collaboration was highly productive yet challenging to each side’s core beliefs. This paper will discuss how Bogoras’s and Jochelson’s views were shaped in a fascinating knowledge exchange which included American anthropologists, Russian ethnographers, their wives and the multiple indigenous ethnic groups under investigation.

In the decade preceding World War II, the so-called Prague Linguistic Circle (Prague linguistic school) developed the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. While the original circle practically ceased to exist during World War II, its ideas were clandestinely revived and developed during the rule of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1948-1989). Just after WWII, digital computers were entering the scene, promising to provide researchers of all branches with a powerful tool. Linguists, like other researchers, were not entirely united as to their hopes in the new technology. In the Soviet bloc, the visions of using the computer were also influenced by the ideological pertinence of such use. While the use of computers by mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and engineers was undisputed, using computers to aid linguists was not supported in the early 1950s. Expelled from the Faculty of Arts for their wishes to do linguistics on computers, the Circle found refuge at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. While initially the linguists took their new location only as a substitute to the desired one, they gradually won their position among linguists abroad and after 1989, revived the original name. The presentation will focus on the effects of this forced institutional position of linguists close to the departments of mathematics and computer science and will analyse the development of computer-based linguistics in this context.