Abstract
When contemplating the question “what is Russian philosophy?,” there are several answers that might come to the non-Russian mind. There are the household names of the philosophical novelists, most notably Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. There are also those well-known philosophers of Russian descent who made their way to the West, such as Mikhail Bakunin, the “father of anarchism,” or literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. There are the Russian existentialists, including Nikolai Berdiaev, Vasilii Rozanov, and Lev Shestov. One might equally recall the schools of Russian materialism and, later, the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet period. “Russian philosophy” could just as well be employed to refer to all philosophers writing in Russian, to all philosophers living in Russia, or even more broadly, to everything philosophical happening in Russia at any given time.
“Oh unfathomable (as usual) Russian soul!”
— Alexander Zinoviev, The Madhouse
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Notes
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia. Studies in Literature, History, and Philosophy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Macmillian, 1961–1967), 2.
Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia: Osnovnye problemy russkoi mysli XIX veka i nachala XX veka (Paris: YMCA Press, 1946), 248.
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Konstantin Aksakov, “On the Internal State of Russia,” in Russian Intellectual History. An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Humanity Books, 1966), 235.
Sergey Horujy, “Breaks and Links: Prospects for Russian Religious Thought Today,” Studies in East European Thought 53.4 (2001): 269.
Charles Taylor, “Western Secularity,” in Rethinking Secularism, eds. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34.
Semen Frank, Russkoe mirovozzrenie (SPb: Nauka, 1996), 151. [Глубочайшие и наиболее значительные идеи были высказаны в Poccun не в систематических научных трудах, а в соваршенно иных формах — литературных].
Aleksei Losev, Filosofiia Mifologiia. KuI’tura (M: Respublika, 1991), 212 [Русская художественная литература — вот истинная русская философия].
Aleksandr Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. XI (M: AN SSSR, 1937–1949), 127 [История её [России] требует другой мысли, другой формулы…].
James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 55.
Maksim Demin, “Pisatel’ kak filosof: Filosofskaia refleksiia nad russkoi literaturoi v kontse XIX — nachale XX vv.,” Die Welt der Slaven LVII (2012), 69 [… позволяет философу не только подтвердить свои теоретические построения примерами из реальных яудожественных практик, но и говорить от лица национальной традиции].
Edith Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5–6.
Viktor Pelevin, Generation Р (M: Eskmo, 2009), 114. [пустота внутри этой бутылки напомнила об идеологической исчерпанкости коммунизма, бессмысленности исторических кровопролитий и в общем кризисе русской идеи].
Aleksei Parshin, “Russkaia religioznaia mysl’: Vozrozhdenie i1i konservatsiia,” Seminar Russkaia filosofiia (traditsiia i sovremennost’) 2004–2009 (M: Russkii put’, 2011), 74.
Iu. A. Akhapkin and K. F. Bogdanova, comps., Lenin — Krupskaia — Ul’ianov’y. Perepiska (1883–1900) (M: Mys1’, 1981), letter 184 [Володя уеиленно читает всякую философию (это теперь его официальное занятие)].
Georgii Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 234.
Lesley Chamberlain, Motherland. A Philosophical History of Russia (New York: Overlook, 2007), 85.
Sergei Dovlatov, Chemodan (SPb: Azbuka, 2001), 10 [На дне — Карл Mаркс. На крышке — Бродский].
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: U University of Minnesota P Press: Minneapolis, 1982), 220.
James P. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 9.
Aleksandr Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. VII (M: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954–1965), 297.
Evgenii Barabanov, “Russkaia filosofiia i krizis identichnoisti,” Voprosy filosofii 8 (1991): 102–117;
Wilhelm Goerdt, Russische Philosophie: Zugänge und Durchblicke, Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1984.
Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianism,” in Smysl zhizni ( M: Respublika, 1994), 350 [Русское — не тождественно с христианским, а представляет собою чрезвычайно ценную национальную и индивидуальную особенность среди христианства, которая несомненно имеет универсальное, всвленское значение].
Maks Fasmer, Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka, vol. III (M: Progress, 1987), 505.
Gromov, Struktura i tipologiia russkoi srednevekovoi filosofii (M: IFRAN, 1997), 20–21 [… о термине «российская философия» можно говорить в качестве некоего условно выделяемого понятия, как мы говорим о«европейской философии» в целом, но авторы, испольщуюшие его, говорят…именно о русской философии как таковой].
Boris Pruzhinin, “Ot redaktora,” Rossiiskaia filosofiia prodolzhaetsia: Iz XX veka v XXI, ed. Boris Pmzhinin (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 6 [… наконец, стать национально, т.е. русской, а не оставаться только государственной — российской].
Aleksandr Zamaleev, Intuitsii russkogo urna. Stat’i. Vystupleniia. Zametki (SPb: Universitetskaia kniga, 2011), 25 [Русская философия была делом интернационального творчества, и эту ее особенность всегда необходимо понять, думая о ее перспективе].
Vasilii Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (M: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2001), 25 [Некоторые исследователи предпочитают говорить не о «русской философии>, а о «философии в России», желая этим выразить ту мысль, что в русскик философских построениях нет ничего «специфически русского>, что русская философия не стала еще национальной, т.е. не поднялась до раскрытия и выражения основных исканий русской души. Это, конечно, неверно … ].
Tat’iana Artem’eva, “‘Kafedral’naia filosofiia’ v Rossii. Istoki i traditsii,” Sfinks 2 (1994), 7 [… понятия «русская философия» и«философия, изучаемая в российских учебных заведениях» не тождественны ни по содержанию, не по объему, хотя некоторые исследователи русской философии не мыслят возможности ее развития кроме в рамках «школах»].
Maiia Soboleva, Rossiiskaia postsovetskaia fllosofiia opyt’samoanaliza (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2009).
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstandings and Professorial Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4.
On Cambridge idealism, see C. J. Dewey, “‘Cambridge Idealism’: Utilitarian Revisionists in Late Nineteenth-Century Cambridge,” Historical Journal XVII.I (1974), 63–78. For Kevin J. Harrelson, implicit in the prehistory of this tradition is a deliberate exclusion of Hegel from the philosophical canon in favor of the Seven Thinkers narrative (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) that was constructed by German epistemologists in the mid-nineteenth century.
See Kevin J. Harrelson, “Hegel and the Modern Canon,” Owl of Minerva 44, 1–2 (2012–2013): 1–35.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1945), 643.
Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy. A Philosophical Chronicle (Edinburgh, 2006).
Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 753. Rorty offers a quite different explanation. There is no reason to build bridges between analytic and Continental philosophy, he argues, since the two strains of inquiry are involved in entirely different projects. Rorty, 226.
I do not discuss such exceptions at length, but another example is Alvin Plantinga, who approaches the philosophy of religion from the standpoint of logic. For a discussion of Plantinga’s work on theology in relation to the Continental tradition, see Nick Trakakis, “Meta-Philosophy of Religion. The Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy of Religion,” Ars Disputandi 7, 2007. www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000296/article.pdf. For studies of the influence of Tolstoy on Wittgenstein, see Russell Nieli, Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language (New York: SUNY Press, 1987);
Emyr Vaughan Thomas, “Wittgenstein and Tolstoy: The Authentic Orientation,” Religious Studies 33 (1997): 363–377;
Caleb Thompson, “Wittgenstein and the Meaning of Life,” Philosophical Investigations 20.2 (2002): 96–116.
Mikhail Epstein, “Ideas against Ideocracy: The Platonic Drama of Russian Thought,” in In Marx’s Shadow. Knowledge, Intellectuals, and Power in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradan and Serguei A. Oushakine (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 34.
W. J. Gavin and T. J. Blakeley’s Russia and America: A Philosophical Comparison (Dordrecht and Boston: Springer, 1976).
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DeBlasio, A. (2014). What Is Russian Philosophy?. In: The End of Russian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137409904_2
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