bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)
Authors: Olkowski Dorothea E.
Published: September 2018

Although grounded in the history of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s work does not begin with first principles but grasps the philosophical terrain ‘in the middle’. This method overthrows subject–object relations in order to initiate a philosophy of difference and chance that is not derived from static being; a philosophy of the event, not of the signifier-signified; a form of content that consists of a complex of forces that are not separable from their form of expression; the assemblage or body without organs, not the organized ego; time, intensity and duration instead of space; in short, a world in constant motion consisting of becomings and encounters with the ‘outside’ that such concepts do not grasp.

This radical philosophical project is rendered most clearly in Deleuze (and his collaborator Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’). The rhizome is a multiplicity without any unity that could fix a subject or object. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other, though in no fixed order and with no homogeneity. It can break or rupture at any point, yet old connections will start up again or new connections will be made; the rhizome’s connections thus have the character of a map, not a structural or generative formation. The rhizome, then, is no model, but a ‘line of flight’ that opens up the route for encounters and makes philosophy into cartography.
Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)
Authors: Cutrofello Andrew
Published: September 2018

Jacques Derrida is a prolific French philosopher born in Algeria. His work can be understood in terms of his argument that it is necessary to interrogate the Western philosophical tradition from the standpoint of ‘deconstruction’. As an attempt to approach that which remains unthought in this tradition, deconstruction is concerned with the category of the ‘wholly other’.

Derrida has called into question the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a valuing of truth as self-identical immediacy which has been sustained by traditional attempts to demonstrate the ontological priority and superiority of speech over writing. Arguing that the distinction between speech and writing can be sustained only by way of a violent exclusion of otherness, Derrida has attempted to develop a radically different conception of language, one that would begin from the irreducibility of difference to identity and that would issue in a correspondingly different conception of ethical and political responsibility.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998)
Authors: Carroll David
Published: September 2018

Jean-François Lyotard was a prominent French philosopher who is generally considered the leading theorist of postmodernism. His work constitutes an insistent critique of philosophical closure, historical totalization and political dogmatism and a re-evaluation of the nature of ethics, aesthetics and politics after the demise of totalizing metatheories.

In his early works, Lyotard confronts the limitations of dialectical philosophy and structuralist linguistics and analyses the disruptive, extradiscursive force of desire and the nonrepresentational or figurative dimensions of art and literature. In La Condition postmoderne (1979a) (The Postmodern Condition, 1984), he treats narrative pragmatics and language games as the bases for a critical approach to postmodern art and politics, as well as to the problem of justice. Recent texts insist on the obligation of philosophy, politics and writing to bear witness to heterogeneity and to what is repressed or forgotten in all representations of the past. His work questions the limits of philosophy, aesthetics and political theory in terms of problems linked to the irreducible complexities of art and literature and the nonrepresentational affects of historical-political events.
Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973)
Authors: Cooper David E.
Published: September 2018

Marcel was a distinguished French playwright and music critic as well as philosopher. It was he who coined the term ’existentialism’, although he was reluctant to be pigeon-holed a ’Christian existentialist’. Born into a well-off family of civil servants, Marcel – never a healthy man – worked for the Red Cross during the First World War, an experience which shaped his view of human relationships and confirmed a religious conviction that led to conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1929. After an early flirtation with F.H. Bradley’s idealism, Marcel independently developed a phenomenology of human existence and a religious conception of being similar, in several respects, to those of Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber. He was much in demand as a lecturer in his later years.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814–76)
Authors: Kelly Aileen
Published: September 2018

Bakunin was the leading proponent in the second half of the nineteenth century of a variety of anarchism rooted in a Romantic cult of primitive spontaneity, and one of the principal ideologists of Russian populism. But along with his public defence of the principle of ’absolute liberty’ he attempted to set up networks of secret societies which were to direct the revolution and subsequently assume dictatorial powers. The contradiction between these two aspects of his activities has puzzled historians, many of whom have sought the answer in his personality, in which the urge to dominate was as strong as the urge to rebel.
Belinskii, Vissarion Grigorievich (1811–48)
Authors: Terras Victor
Published: September 2018

Belinskii was considered by his followers in the nineteenth century, and by the official ideology of the Soviet period, to be not only Russia’s greatest literary critic, but also a leading Russian thinker. Soviet encyclopedias label him ‘critic, publicist and philosopher’. His role in Russian cultural life has been given positive as well as negative assessments, but there can be no doubt as to his huge influence. He is largely responsible for the fact that Russian literature and art, for a century and a half now, have been considered an organ of society, a mirror of the Russian nation’s destiny and a vehicle of its historical progress. It is largely his merit – or fault – that in Russia, art and literature have been accorded a lofty status of leadership and authority, and also that ‘art for art’s sake’ never became respectable in Russia. The influence of Belinskii’s philosophy of art extended through the entire political spectrum, far beyond his political legacy which was limited to the revolutionary left. The idea that art and literature are organic functions of society, nationhood and historical progress, which Belinskii took for granted, was passed on even to the Slavophile right and the liberal Westernizing centre. It was still an integral part of the doctrine of Socialist Realism.
Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–89)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Nikolai Chernyshevskii was the main theorist of the Russian democratic radicalism of ‘the 1860s’ or, more precisely, of the period of political ‘thaw’ and liberal reforms which followed Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the enthronement (in 1855) of Alexander II. He was also the best representative of the non-conformist elements among the raznochintsy, that is, the educated commoners, who at that time began to figure prominently in Russian intellectual and social life. As such, he exerted a powerful formative influence on the Russian intelligentsia.

In 1862 Chernyshevskii was arrested, brought to trial and, despite insufficient evidence, condemned to lifetime banishment in Siberia. In exile, preserving his integrity to the end, he stoutly refused to ask for clemency (as a result, he remained in a remote Siberian village until 1883). In prison, waiting for trial, he wrote the novel Chto Delat’ (What Is To Be Done?) in which he showed the ‘new men’ of Russia – ‘rational egoists’, devoted to the cause of progress, and even a type of ascetic, self-sacrificing revolutionist. Thanks to a strange oversight of the censor the novel was serialized in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and, despite lack of literary distinction, became a powerful source of inspiration for several generations of Russian progressive youth.

Chernyshevskii’s philosophical reputation was created by the Russian Marxists. The ‘father of Russian Marxism’, G.V. Plekhanov, greatly impressed by Chernyshevskii’s combination of Feuerbachian materialism and respect for Hegelian dialectics, described him as an important precursor of dialectical materialism. This view was taken up by Lenin who in Materialism and Empiriocriticism called Chernyshevskii ‘the great Russian Hegelian and materialist’, the only Russian philosopher before Marxism who was able to defend ‘integral materialism’ against the agnosticism and subjectivism of Neo-Kantians, positivists, Machists and ‘other muddleheads’. Soviet philosophers went even further: Chernyshevskii was treated by them not only as the greatest Russian philosopher before Marxism, but also as the greatest pre-Marxian philosopher of the world, founder of the highest form of pre-Marxian materialism. For several decades this was the obligatory dogma of the Soviet official ideology.

After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, interest in Chernyshevskii’s philosophy almost completely disappeared in Russia. It is impossible, however, to deny Chernyshevskii’s importance in Russian intellectual history. Hence the need of rethinking his philosophical legacy.
Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)
Authors: Young George M.
Published: September 2018

Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead.
Florenskii, Pavel Aleksandrovich (1882–1937)
Authors: Slesinski Robert
Published: September 2018

A figure of genius in the history of twentieth-century Russian religious philosophy, Florenskii did much to influence the directions of subsequent Russian thought, both within the Soviet Union and abroad in the Russian diaspora. Florenskii’s originality is most noticeable in his chief philosophical work, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (The Pillar and Foundation of Truth) (1914), a somewhat eclectic and romantic work in which he sets forth his basic tenets in epistemology and sophiology. The work, which was his doctoral dissertation, represents a decisive rejection of rationalist and Western-orientated religious philosophy and theology in favour of a more concrete and experiential methodology.
Frank, Semën Liudvigovich (1877–1950)
Authors: Swoboda Philip J.
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of S.L. Frank was one product of the renewed interest in epistemology, speculative metaphysics and religion among educated Russians in the quarter-century preceding the Revolution of 1917. Frank published the first volume of his philosophical system in 1915, but most of his major works were written after the Revolution, in European exile.

Influenced by tendencies in turn-of-the-century European thought that criticized the exaggerated pretensions of scientific reason, Frank formed the conviction that abstract, conceptual thought was inherently incapable of mastering ultimate reality. A valid metaphysics was nevertheless possible, founded on our capacity for direct, intuitive apprehension of reality in its living concreteness.

In intuitive knowledge, reality discloses itself as a ‘total-unity’ – an all-embracing unity in which the dualities with which conceptual thought wrestles are overcome without being dissolved. Ultimate reality is itself grounded in, and embraced by, a principle Frank termed ‘Divinity’, one that manifests itself in religious experience as the personal God of Christian faith. The rootedness of the human person in this divine principle is the condition of possibility of all spiritual creativity – of art, science, morality and law, and religion.
Hessen, Sergei Iosifovich (1887–1950)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Sergei Hessen, a disciple of Rickert, has been described as ’the most brilliant and philosophically gifted’ representative of Neo-Kantian transcendentalism in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. A co-editor of the St Petersburg-based philosophical journal Logos, he represented a distinctively Westernizing trend, critical in many respects of the openly metaphysical religious idealism of the ‘religious-philosophical renaissance’ in Russia. However, he readily acknowledged the existence of an ineradicable metaphysical need in human beings and stressed the metaphysical relevance of his philosophy of moral and cultural values. B.V. Iakovenko attributed to him a pronounced ‘ontological aspiration’ and Hessen’s philosophical evolution led him beyond ’pure anthropologism’, towards a religiously tinged Platonism.

Like many Russian philosophers, Hessen concentrated on philosophical problems which had direct relevance for practice. His main fields were philosophical pedagogy, which he defined as ’applied philosophy’, and political philosophy, with particular emphasis on philosophy of law. Like many other Russian philosophers, he was forced to emigrate, moving from one country to another, which did not help his professional career. Nevertheless, his work Osnovy pedagogiki (Foundations of Pedagogy) (published in Berlin, 1923) was translated into many languages and won him international recognition as the main author of the ‘pedagogy of culture’. His original conception of ‘rule-of-law socialism’ (which deserves to be regarded as the last link in the legal philosophy of Russian liberalism) was much less known, and the manuscripts of his two books on political philosophy perished in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Still, the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Basis of Human Rights invited him to contribute to the preparation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. His article for UNESCO, together with his writings on political philosophy published posthumously in Italy, were a Russian contribution to the philosophy of human rights in modern, liberal democratic states.
Kozlov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1831–1901)
Authors: Poole Randall A.
Published: September 2018

One of the forerunners of the idealist revival in Russian philosophy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Aleksei Kozlov was the founder of Russian neo-Leibnizianism. In his system of ‘panpsychism’, which conceives all reality as psychic or conscious, he advanced a pluralistic idealism and metaphysical personalism that proved to be a considerable source of creativity in Russian philosophy. In his first and middle periods, the main influences on Kozlov were Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and Kant. He then turned, in the mid-1880s, to Leibnizian monadology and Leibniz’s nineteenth-century followers, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81) and especially Gustav Teichmüller (1832–88), professor at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu). Apart from the significance of his own philosophical conceptions, Kozlov had an important developmental role in Russian philosophy, being one of the earliest defenders of speculative philosophy against the prevailing positivism. His essays in philosophical history and criticism performed a valuable educational service, especially in view of the fact that philosophy had been banned from the university curriculum in Russia between 1850 and 1863 and was still trying to recover.
Kropotkin, Pëtr Alekseevich (1842–1921)
Authors: Cahm Caroline
Published: September 2018

A founder of anarchist communism and guiding spirit of the international anarchist movement after the death of Bakunin, Kropotkin was also a distinguished geographer, a scientist and a positivist. He saw the development of anarchism as one aspect of the whole movement of modern science towards an integrated philosophy. He believed that the dominant phenomenon in nature was harmony, arrived at by a continuous process of adjustment between contending forces. In human, as in animal societies, the dominant phenomenon was mutual aid: thus once metaphysics, law and state authority had been shaken off, harmony could be realized.
Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich (1870–1924)
Authors: Service Robert
Published: September 2018

Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, wrote mainly about politics and economics, but as a Marxist of his generation he assumed that ideas about society needed to rest on sound philosophical premises. He was a militant atheist. He also regarded any other version of ‘materialism’ than his own as being a perversion of Marxism. Initially his works proposed an epistemology based on a crude analogy with photography. But in the First World War he revised his ideas after studying Hegel, and began to emphasize provisionality in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless he never disowned his earlier writings. And after his death his confused philosophical oeuvre retained axiomatic status in Marxism-Leninism.
Leont’ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich (1831–91)
Authors: Kline George L.
Published: September 2018

One of the more original and provocative nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, Leont’ev directed a powerful intellectual attack at the dominant historical movement of his time: the process of modernization that was sweeping across Western Europe and making inroads into Russia. Leont’ev resisted the sociopolitical aspects of this process: the spread of democratic, egalitarian and constitutional principles. He also resisted its cultural and psychological aspects: the emergence of a standardized, homogenized mode of life and set of values.

Leont’ev defended the traditional values and institutions of monarchy, established Church, aristocracy and – especially – the distinctiveness and variety of national cultures. It was this distinctiveness, based on the isolation of nation states, that he saw as increasingly threatened by the advancing technologies of transport and communication.
Losev, Aleksei Fëdorovich (1893–1988)
Authors: Kline George L.
Published: September 2018

A leading Russian philosopher, religious thinker and classical scholar of the twentieth century, Losev made important contributions to the theory of language, myth and symbol, as well as to the understanding of ancient Greek thought and culture. He strongly resisted central aspects of modernization, in particular the spread of what he saw as ’bourgeois’ and ’philistine’ secularism, positivism, materialism, atheism, selfish individualism and ’machine civilization’.

A scholar of staggering erudition with a lifelong passion for the ancient world, especially the thought of Plato, Losev could be a fierce, sometimes abusive polemicist. His relation to the Soviet regime ranged from open defiance in the late 1920s (which led to prison and the gulag for almost three years) to at least pro forma acceptance of certain key elements of Marxist ideology and philosophy in the period between 1953 and 1988.
Lossky, Nicholas Onufrievich (1870–1965)
Authors: Scanlan James P.
Published: September 2018

In 1922, the Russian neo-Leibnizian idealist Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, one of his country’s most distinguished professional philosophers, was banished from Russia along with more than a hundred other non-Marxist intellectuals whose influence the communist authorities feared. A prolific writer before his exile, Lossky continued to write and publish widely abroad, becoming not only the dean of the Russian émigré philosophical community but a thinker well known in Europe and the English-speaking world through many translations of his works.

The systematic structure and rationalistic tone of Lossky’s philosophizing set him apart from most of his fellow Russian idealists, but like them he proceeded in his thinking from a strong conviction of the truth of Christianity; he wrote of his commitment to ‘working out a system of metaphysics necessary for a Christian interpretation of the world’ (1951: 266). He adhered to a radical form of theism according to which the created natural order has nothing in common ontologically with the divine order that created it.

Lossky is best known for a set of interrelated views in epistemology and metaphysics connected with what he considered his fundamental philosophical insight – the principle that ‘everything is immanent in everything’. According to his doctrine of ‘intuitivism’ in epistemology, all cognition is intuitive; there is an ‘epistemological co-ordination’ of subject and object such that any object, whether sensory, intellectual or mystical, is immediately present in the mind of the knower. As the heir to a Leibnizian tradition in Russian metaphysics represented before him by Aleksei Kozlov and others, Lossky advanced a theory of ‘hierarchical personalism’ in which Leibniz’s monads became interacting ‘substantival agents’ existing at various levels of development; the choices of these ideal beings generate the material world (hence Lossky’s term ‘ideal realism’ for his ontology) and their reconfigurations and reincarnations move the cosmic process towards the perfection of the Kingdom of God. In his ‘ontological theory of values’ Lossky affirms a metaphysical basis for absolute values and attributes all evil – including diseases and natural disasters – to the misuse of free will by substantival agents, both human and subhuman.
Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich (1857–1918)
Authors: White James D.
Published: September 2018

Known as ’the Father of Russian Marxism’, Plekhanov was the chief popularizer and interpreter of Marxism in Russia in the 1880s. His interest in the philosophical aspects of Marxism made him influential outside as well as inside Russia. He was a prolific writer, and dealt with several aspects of Marxist thought.

Plekhanov was an important figure in the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a founder member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and a leading figure in its Menshevik wing after it split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903. As a politician, Plekhanov was constantly involved in polemics with political and ideological opponents. Most of his theoretical works are to some degree polemical, and it was the conflicts among Russian revolutionary groups that shaped Plekhanov’s interpretation of Marx’s thought.

A basic feature of this interpretation was that Russia’s historical development was like that of Western European countries, and would pass through a capitalist phase before progressing to socialism. Accordingly, Plekhanov gave prominence to those of Marx’s writings which could be presented in a deterministic way. Plekhanov insisted that Marxism was a materialist doctrine (as opposed to an idealist one) and as such recognized the primacy of matter in all spheres of existence.

Plekhanov was in many ways an innovator, being the writer who first coined the term ’dialectical materialism’, and who drew attention to the Hegelian origins of Marx’s system. His writings were quickly translated into several European languages. His interpretation of Marxism was much admired by Lenin, and was to form the basis of the official ideology of the Soviet Union. The conception of Marxism that Plekhanov propounded continues to exercise a profound influence on conceptions of Marxism throughout the world.
Shestov, Lev (Yehuda Leib Shvartsman) (1866–1938)
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer
Published: September 2018

A major though atypical figure of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Shestov taught that reason and science can neither explain tragedy and suffering, nor answer the questions that matter most. A maximalist, a subjectivist and an anti-dogmatist, Shestov regarded philosophical idealism as an attempt to gloss over the ‘horrors of life’ and attacked morality and ethics as inherently coercive. He maintained that science ignores the contingent, the unique and the ineffable, that philosophy cannot be a science, and that necessity depersonalizes and dehumanizes the individual. Philosophy and revelation are incompatible because God is not bound by reason, nature or autonomous ethics. To God ‘all things are possible’, even undoing what has already happened. God even restored Job’s dead children to him – the same children, not new ones, Shestov insisted.

In Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i Fr. Nitshe (The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche) (1900) and Dostoevskii i Nitshe (Dostoevsky and Nietzsche) (1903) Shestov attacked philosophical idealism and attributed his subjects’ philosophies to a defining personal experience: Tolstoi’s horror at urban poverty, Nietzsche’s illness, and Dostoevskii’s Siberian exile, respectively. These books established Shestov as a major literary critic and interpreter of Nietzsche. Around 1910 he turned to philosophy and religion. In his magnum opus Athènes et Jerusalem (1938) Shestov preached a religious existentialism centred on the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and argued that evil came into the world with knowledge. Adam and Socrates were fallen men because they opted for knowledge over life and faith. Socrates, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Husserl were all faith-destroying. Shestov preferred the anti-rationalism of Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Tertullian, Luther, Pascal and Kierkegaard. He wanted to restore the primordial freedom of Adam before the Fall. Although Shestov quoted the Gospels and certain Christian theologians approvingly, he was not a Christian. Neither was he an adherent of traditional Judaism.

A brilliant stylist, Shestov used reason and knowledge to combat reason and knowledge. He distinguished between the empirical realm where they applied and the metaphysical realm where they did not. But since he philosophized only about the metaphysical realm he comes across as an irrationalist.
Schellingianism, Russian
Authors: Terras Victor
Published: September 2018

Schelling’s philosophy, spread by German professors teaching at Russian universities and by Russians who had studied in Germany, some with Schelling himself, had an early and lasting influence in Russia. It was greatest in aesthetic theory and in the philosophy of history, but it was noticeable even in the natural sciences. Schelling appealed especially to Russians who were inclined to reconcile a modern scientific worldview with religious faith or with an exalted view of art. Particularly prominent figures were Odoevskii, Belinskii, Chaadaev, Venevitinov and Solov’ëv.
Slavophilism
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

In the Slav countries outside Russia the term ’Slavophilism’ is a generic name for all advocates of the ’Slav idea’, irrespective of their philosophical views and political commitments. In Russia, however, this term is used, as a rule, to denote one specific ideology, elaborated in the 1840s by the former members of the Schellingian circle of ’Lovers of Wisdom’: Ivan Kireevskii (1806–56) and Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–60). Among its other followers, the most creative were the former Hegelians – Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60) and Iurii Samarin (1819–76). Despite some individual differences, all these thinkers shared a coherent view of the world which was expressed in their philosophical, theological and historical ideas. Their importance was not immediately recognized, but after Dostoevskii and Solov’ëv it became clear that they were the most important part of Russia’s ’philosophical awakening’ in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The words ’Slavophiles’ and ’Slavophilism’ were originally intended as gibes. The same was true of the words ’Westernizers’ and ’Westernism’. All these terms, however, could be interpreted positively and were finally accepted by both sides of the ’Slavophile–Westernizer’ controversy. But in the case of the Slavophiles it was a very reluctant acceptance: they felt that the term ’Slavophilism’ failed to express the essential nature of their philosophical and religious position. In addition, this term contained a rather misleading suggestion as to their solidarity with non-Russian Slavs: in fact they focused their attention on the ’truly Christian’ and ’purely Slav’ spiritual heritage of pre-Petrine Russia. An interest in the fates of non-Russian Slavs began to play a role in their ideology only at the time of the Crimean War. This shift of focus transformed the original Slavophilism into a form of imperial Russian Pan-Slavism.
Russian Empiriocriticism
Authors: Joravsky David
Published: September 2018

Russian empiriocriticism was an ephemeral movement within Russian Marxism of the early twentieth century. Its brief existence and deep involvement in politics invite the judgment, ’of historic interest only’. But that pat phrase dodges the problem of comprehending history and acting appropriately, which obsessed such thinkers as A.A. Bogdanov (1873–1928) and A.V. Lunacharskii (1875–1933), the best-remembered of the Russians who looked to Mach and Avenarius for philosophic support of Marx. In its German origins empiriocriticism was an academic effort to avoid metaphysics while analysing experience as the source of knowledge. In Russia the focus moved outside of academic cloisters. How is one to relate action to social understanding, if one knows that action and understanding shape each other within an overwhelming process of socioeconomic transformations? Analysis of ’experience’ or ’practice’ in the Russian context – a ’backward’ society under a tyrannical state in an age of total war – nullified the academic calm of Mach and Avenarius. Their Russian admirers wanted to justify Marx’s claims of social knowledge that would be both scientific and revolutionary; they rejected philosophies that merely interpret the world in different ways, while the task, described in Marx’s final ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’, is to change it.
Moscow-Tartu School
Authors: Todd William Mills
Published: September 2018

The Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics (theory of signs) was formed when a diverse group of scholars joined informally from the 1950s to 1980s to provide alternatives to the regnant Soviet approaches to language, literature and culture. Their work develops the linguistics of Saussure, elaborated by Trubetzkoi and Hjelmslev, with its central notions of sign as union of signifier and signified, its distinction between language as system (langue) and language as utterance (parole), and its analysis in terms of the significant differences between paired equivalent elements in a system (that is, meaning is a matter not of individual elements, but of the relationship between comparable elements). In its early stages members of the Moscow-Tartu School did intricate analyses of lyric poetry and of highly conventional prose works (such as detective stories) using statistical and linguistic methods. They subsequently came to treat art works and other cultural artefacts as the products of ‘secondary modelling systems’, that is, as elements arranged according to rules that could be seen as language-like and hence accessible to analysis by the procedures of structuralist linguistics. The group shared an interest in Western and pre-Stalinist Russian literary theory – especially in the Russian formalists – and in contemporary linguistics, semiotics and cybernetics. In a time of pervasive intellectual stagnation this loose confederation sought to formulate objective and exact methods for literary scholarship, to republish works of Russian theory that had been repressed from the 1930s to 1950s, and to bring scholarship in the humanities into line with developments in other scholarly fields. During the 1970s prominent members of the group, such as Iu.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, turned from more theoretical and formalized work to historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic systems.
Nihilism, Russian
Authors: Lovell Stephen
Published: September 2018

The term ’Nihilist’, although it was first used in Russian as early as 1829, only acquired its present significance in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons) (1862), where it is applied to the central character, Bazarov. Thereafter Nihilism quickly became the subject of polemical debate in the journal press and in works of literature. The Nihilists were the generation of young, radical, non-gentry intellectuals who espoused a thoroughgoing materialism, positivism and scientism. The major theorists of Russian Nihilism were Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev, although their authority and influence extended well beyond the realm of theory. Nihilism was a broad social and cultural movement as well as a doctrine.

Russian Nihilism negated not the normative significance of the world or the general meaning of human existence, but rather a particular social, political and aesthetic order. Despite their name, the Russian Nihilists did hold beliefs – most notably in themselves and in the power of their doctrine to effect social change. It is, however, the vagueness of their positive programmes that distinguishes the Nihilists from the revolutionary socialists who followed them. Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged; it held the potential for both Jacobinism and anarchism.
Russian Darwinism
Authors: Vucinich Alexander
Published: September 2018

The Russian scientific community welcomed Darwin’s evolutionary theory and made it a basis of research in a wide range of biological sciences. Russian evolutionary studies in embryology, paleontology, microbiology and pathology attracted international attention. The vast scope of Darwin’s popularity in Russia was dramatically manifested in 1909, on the occasion of the national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great English scientist and the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. All universities, naturalist societies, and many newspapers and popular journals took part in the celebration, which produced a hundred praiseful publications on Darwinian themes.

University philosophers, steeped in metaphysical idealism and spiritualism, linked Darwinism to what they called ‘modern scientific materialism’ and rejected it wholly. They were strongly predisposed to welcome modern revivals of metaphysical vitalism. Freelance philosophers, usually associated with heterodox ideological movements and influenced by Auguste Comte’s positivism or various modern neopositivist and Neo-Kantian currents, credited Darwinism with making science a major topic of modern philosophy. A new discipline, known as ‘scientific philosophy’, rapidly developing in the West, made its first appearance in Russia.

In the Soviet Union, Darwin’s evolutionary theory followed a course of cataclysmic ruptures. During the 1920s, Soviet scientists made significant contributions to the study of the role of the genetic environment in biological evolution and helped set the stage for an evolutionary synthesis of Darwinism and genetics. The Stalinist era (1929–53) marked a drastic departure from the prevalent currents in evolutionary biology. It was dominated by the rise of Lysenkoism, a pseudo-science identified as ‘creative Darwinism’, and was guided by a diluted version of the Lamarckian idea of evolution as a product of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lysenkoism rejected the Darwinian conception of natural selection, downgraded the role of physico-chemical analysis in biology, and paid no attention to molecular biology. In 1948 Lysenkoism was officially recognized as the Marxist theory of evolution. Under Lysenko’s influence, genetics was proclaimed a ‘bourgeois science’ and was made illegal. The downfall of Lysenkoism in 1964 brought the re-establishment of genetics, a full-scale return to true Darwinism, and a re-intensified interest in ‘evolutionary synthesis’.
Russian aesthetics
Authors: Terras Victor
Published: September 2018

Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, or in the sense of an explicitly stated theory of art, appeared in Russia no earlier than the seventeenth century, under the direct influence of Western thought. It developed in connection with the adoption of European art forms. Russian contributions in terms of original styles in all forms of art, as well as of certain aesthetic notions which may be credited to Russia, came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and must be understood in context with European art and aesthetic thought. Russian art, music and literature, as well as the aesthetic notions guiding them, get their Russianness from the political and social background, a major factor in literature, and from a carrying over of traits found in Russian folk art, folk music and folklore, as well as in religious texts, iconography, architecture and music, whose Orthodox version is sharply distinct from their equivalents in the Roman Catholic West.
Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (1866–1949)
Authors: Bird Robert
Published: September 2018

Viacheslav Ivanov was a leading theoretician of the symbolist literary movement and a prominent figure in the renaissance of religious thought in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. A classical scholar by training, and erudite poet by vocation, Ivanov became known as an acolyte of Nietzsche. Later, along with the other ‘younger’ symbolists Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi, Ivanov presented himself as a disciple of Vladimir Solov’ëv’s idealistic metaphysics and theurgic aesthetics. In the 1910s Ivanov achieved a proto-hermeneutic conception of art, which was the basis of his groundbreaking writings on Dostoevskii. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1924 Ivanov became a Roman Catholic and achieved some notoriety in Catholic intellectual circles between the wars. His powerful influence is evident in many contemporary and later thinkers in fields ranging from aesthetics and literary theory to philosophy and theology.
Russian Idea, the
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

‘The Russian Idea’ is a term used by Russian thinkers to define specific features of Russian culture, the spiritual make-up of the Russian nation, the meaning of Russian history and, as a rule (although not always), Russia’s unique mission in the universal history of humanity.

The term was introduced for the first time in 1861 by Dostoevskii, for whom the essence of the Russian Idea was the ‘universal humanity’ (or ‘all-humanity’) of the Russian spirit. At the same time however, Dostoevskii linked the Russian Idea with Russian imperial messianism. Thus, the notion of the Russian Idea included from its beginning a characteristic tension between striving for universalism and nationalist self-assertion..

The first philosopher to devote a special separate work to the Russian Idea (l’Idée russe, Paris, 1888) was Vladimir Solov’ëv, for whom the national idea was ‘not what a given nation thinks about itself in time, but what God thinks about it in eternity’. He was influenced by Dostoevskii but, challenging Russian nationalists, put much greater emphasis on universalism, stressing that the peculiar greatness of the Russians consisted in their capacity for ‘self-renunciation’. The first case of this self-renunciation was the so-called ‘calling of the Varangians’, that is, the voluntary acceptance of foreign rule; the second was the reforms of Peter the Great: rejection of native traditions for the sake of universal progress.

Now the Russian nation should commit itself to the third, most important act of self-renunciation: to submit itself to the authority of the pope, restoring thereby the unity of the Universal Church and bringing about the reconciliation between East and West. But this act of humility was seen by Solov’ëv as a precondition from the fulfilment of Russia’s great mission of creating the universal, freely theocratic Christian Empire. Solov’ëv invoked in this connection the monk Philotheus’ idea of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ but reversed its meaning by putting emphasis on symbolic Rome, that is, not on national isolationism and keeping intact the purity of the Orthodox faith, but on ecumenical universalism and the messianic task of the Christian transformation of the world.

Owing to Solov’ëv, the term ‘Russian Idea’ came to be applied retrospectively, as a designation of a set of problems characteristic for Russian philosophical discussions about the essence of ‘Russianness’. Most historians agree that these problems were formulated under the reign of Nicholas I and that the first thinker who posed them forcefully was Pëtr Chaadaev.
Karsavin, Lev Platonovich (1882–1952)
Authors: Meerson Michael A.
Published: September 2018

Karsavin belongs to the Russian philosophical school of all-oneness (vseedinstvo) and God’s humanity (bogochelovechestvo) originating with Vladimir Solov’ëv in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Karsavin’s thought embraced the traditions of Neoplatonism, Western participational metaphysics and love-mysticism (with Proclus, Eriugena, the Victorines and Nicholas of Cusa), and applied them to philosophical anthropology.
Tibetan philosophy
Authors: Tillemans Tom J.F.
Published: September 2018

Tibetan philosophy – if we can make a rough separation between what is predominantly argument-oriented and analytical and what is more a question of ritual, devotion or vision – is best characterized as a form of scholasticism. It exhibits marked parallels with philosophy in Western medieval contexts, including a heavy emphasis on logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics, all in the service of exegesis of religious doctrine found in root texts. Just as in Western scholasticism, there is a reliance upon scripture, but within that traditional context there is also ample room for rational analysis and synthesis of potentially disparate doctrines, as well as a considerable quantity of argumentation which is a type of ‘fine tuning’ of Indian issues. Tibetan thinkers explored matters which are often of genuine importance in our understanding of Indian texts. In particular, in Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophy we find an important synthesis of Indian Yogācāra ideas with a relatively natural interpretation of key ideas in the literature on the Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha); we also find important debates on the nature of the two truths, the status of means of valid cognition (pramāṇas), and on questions of philosophical method, such as the possibility or impossibility of Mādhyamikas holding theses and themselves defending positions. Beginning with the Great Debate of bSam-yas (Samyay) in the latter part of the eighth century, we find constantly recurring reflection on questions concerning the nature of spiritual realizations and the role of conceptual and analytic thought in leading to such insights. In the logico-epistemological literature, the hotly debated issues generally centre around the problem of universals, the Indian Buddhist philosophy of language and the theory of the triply characterized logical reason (trirūpahetu). In addition, the Tibetans developed an elaborate logic of debate, an indigenous system containing many original elements unknown in or even alien to Indian Buddhist logic.
Buddhism, Ābhidharmika schools of
Authors: Cox Collett
Published: September 2018

During the first centuries after the Buddha, with the development of a settled life of scholarly study and religious practice, distinct schools began to emerge within the Buddhist community. In their efforts to organize and understand the Buddha’s traditional teachings, these schools developed a new genre of text, called ‘Abhidharma’, to express their doctrinal interpretations. More importantly, the term ‘Abhidharma’ was also used to refer to the discriminating insight that was not only requisite for the elucidation of doctrine but also indispensable for religious practice: only insight allows one to isolate and remove the causes of suffering.

Abhidharma analysis is innovative in both form and content. While earlier Buddhist discourses were colloquial, using simile and anecdotes, Abhidharma texts were in a highly regimented style, using technical language, intricate definitions and complex classifications. The Abhidharma genre also promoted a method of textual exegesis combining scriptural citation and reasoned arguments.

In content, the hallmark of Abhidharma is its exhaustive classification of all factors that were thought to constitute experience. Different schools proposed different classifications; for example, one school proposed a system of seventy-five distinct factors classified into five groups, including material form, the mind, mental factors, factors dissociated from material form and mind, and unconditioned factors. These differences led to heated doctrinal debates, the most serious of which concerned the manner of existence of the individual factors and the modes of their conditioning interaction. For example, do the factors actually exist as real entities or do they exist merely as provisional designations? Is conditioning interaction always successive or can cause and effect be simultaneous in the same moment? Other major topics of debate included differing models for mental processes, especially perception.
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism
Authors: Brzezinski Jan K.
Published: September 2018

The philosophical school encompassing the Bengali devotees of the god Viṣṇu is traditionally known as the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school. Caitanya is considered to be the founder of this school in the sense that he led a revival of Kṛṣṇa devotionalism in Bengal during the early sixteenth century, inspiring a number of contemporary intellectuals to some original speculations of a metaphysical nature. Some of these were directly related to Vedānta, others were not. Since the eighteenth century the school has also become associated through Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa with the Madhva school. However, the latter propounded a dualistic doctrine, while the Gauḍīyas are believers in the inconceivable simultaneous difference and oneness of the Supreme and his creation.
Dignāga (c.480–c.540)
Authors: Hayes Richard P.
Published: September 2018

A logician and epistemologist, Dignāga is traditionally regarded as the founder of a Buddhist school that sought to avoid divisive controversies over which Buddhist writings were authentic by emphasizing logic and epistemology rather than the study of scriptures and their commentaries. His principal contributions consisted of refining the theory of inference and tightening the forms of argument commonly used in debate and polemics. His theories became the basis on which the influential philosopher Dharmakīrti built his system, which became the standard Buddhist scholastic system in India and later in Tibet.
rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen (1364– 1432)
Authors: Dreyfus Georges B.J.
Published: September 2018

rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen (Gyeltsap darma rinchen) was a disciple of the great Tsong kha pa. Like much Tibetan philosophy, his work is commentarial in style. In his commentaries on the work of Dharmakīrti he developed a moderate realist position with regard to abstract entities, claiming that this was what Dharmakīrti (apparently an antirealist) really intended. Properties, rGyal tshab maintained, do exist, but not independently of things; universals are separable from particulars in thought, but never in perception. Perception straightforwardly presents us with real objects; inference, on the other hand, tends to present reality in a distorted way.
mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po (1385–1438)
Authors: Cabezon Jose Ignacio
Published: September 2018

mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po (Kaydrup gelek belsangbo) was one of the early masters of the dGa’-ldan-pa (Gandenba) or dGe-lugs-pa (Gelukba) school of Tibetan Buddhism. His importance derives primarily from his close association with the founder of that school, Tsong kha pa (Dzongkaba, 1357–1419), whose religious and philosophical tradition he was instrumental in preserving and transmitting. A prolific writer, whose interests ranged across the entire spectrum of Buddhist doctrine, from the exoteric (Sūtra) to the esoteric (Tantra), his work is highly regarded for its ability to encapsulate lucidly entire fields of knowledge (for example, Tantra, the Mādhyamika doctrine of emptiness, and the pramāṇa tradition of logic and epistemology).