bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cixous, Hélène (1937–)
Authors: Conley Verena Andermatt
Published: September 2018

Hélène Cixous, a prolific French author born in Algeria, works between poetry and philosophy. She is part of a larger intellectual community in France that, since the 1960s, has sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical’ notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor.

Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Cixous privileges the artistic and poetic but all her work has philosophical underpinnings, especially those proposed by Derrida. Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, multiplicity and life over identity, univocity and death. She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death. Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Hegel and Heidegger.
Cixous, Hélène (1937–)
Authors: Conley Verena Andermatt
Published: September 2018

Hélène Cixous, a prolific, internationally acclaimed French writer born in Algeria and now residing in Paris, works between poetry and continental philosophy. She belongs to a larger community of artists and intellectuals in France that, in the 1960s, actively sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical’ notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor.

Influenced by writers and thinkers from many times and places, Cixous privileges art and poetry in work of strong philosophical inflection, especially where it engages with that of Jacques Derrida. Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, and metamorphosis rather than opposition and identity. She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (generally male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death. Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Freud, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche.
Certeau, Michel de (1925–86)
Authors: Conley Tom
Published: September 2018

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.
De Man, Paul (1919–83
Authors: Bahti Timothy
Published: September 2018

De Man’s work is among the most renowned and influential in American literary theory of the latter twentieth century, especially regarding literary theory’s emergence as an interdisciplinary and philosophically ambitious discourse. Always emphasizing the linguistic aspects of a literary work over thematic, semantic or evaluative ones, de Man specifically focuses on the figurative features of literary language and their consequences for the undecidability of meaning. His extension of his mode of ‘rhetorical reading’ to philosophic texts also participates in the blurring of generic and institutional distinctions between literature and philosophy, a tendency pronounced in French philosophy of the latter twentieth century.
Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)
Authors: Cutrofello Andrew
Published: September 2018

Jacques Derrida was a philosopher for whom nothing about the philosophical enterprise was to be taken for granted. Without ever repudiating philosophy or abandoning the ideal of philosophical rigour, he relentlessly challenged all seemingly settled philosophical practices. He did not believe that his questions could be adequately characterized as metaphilosophical, because he regarded the question ‘What is philosophy?’ as an eminently philosophical one and thus itself in need of scrutiny. To indicate the unique kind of engagement with the philosophical that he was after, Derrida introduced a number of essentially provisional terms, one of which was déconstruction, initially conceived as a French translation of the German word Destruktion which Heidegger had used in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) to characterize his own project of ‘dismantling’ the history of Western metaphysics. In the USA, ‘deconstruction’ came to be associated with a style of literary criticism that was inspired by the work of Derrida but that often lacked its adherence, however uneasy, to the distinction between responsible and irresponsible ways of reading, thinking, and writing. During his lifetime, Derrida was frequently dismissed as a sophist by Anglo-American philosophy professors, whether because they assumed, without reading him, that he himself disregarded this distinction (when in fact he merely insisted on the philosopher’s perpetual responsibility to problematize it anew), or because they resisted the challenges that he posed to merely self-reassuring philosophical practices. Those who appreciated the care and rigour that Derrida brought to bear on philosophical texts and institutions took deconstruction to be the most promising (if not exactly legitimate, since not self-legitimating) offspring of the Kantian critical project.
Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)
Authors: Cutrofello Andrew
Published: September 2018

Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria in 1930, a Jewish citizen of France. He was nine years old when the Nazis marched into Paris. Algeria was never occupied during the war, but the French colonial government implemented numerous anti-Semitic policies. In 1942 Derrida was expelled from his lycée by a rector who took it upon himself to lower the maximum number of Jewish students who were allowed to attend the school. In 1952 he began studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1954 he received his diplôme d’études supérieures. His dissertation, Le probléme de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy), was first published in book form in 1990, by which point his views about Husserl’s phenomenological project had radically changed. In the intervening years he had carried out a comprehensive critique—or, as he preferred to call it, deconstruction—of the entire tradition of Western metaphysics, which had culminated in Husserl’s phenomenological project. The target of deconstruction was ‘logocentrism,’ or the metaphysical doctrine that being could be expressed in inner speech and phonetic writing. This doctrine, fundamental to what Derrida called the metaphysics of presence, lay equally at the foundation of phenomenology. Logocentrism went hand in hand with a conception of self-presence that disavowed its reliance on the written support it paradoxically required in order to articulate its independence from it. Husserl had called attention to this paradox, but instead of recognizing in it the ruin of traditional metaphysics, he took transcendental phenomenology to provide the only means of saving it. In a series of works written in the 1960s, Derrida sought to explain why Husserl’s effort necessarily failed. In so doing he transformed the classical conception of writing into a novel conception of ‘archi-writing’ or ‘différance.’ In the 1970s he concretized this conception by writing texts that problematized their own structure in various ways. In the 1990s he returned to more conventional forms of writing in which he called attention to things that cannot be deconstructed, including justice, the ‘wholly other,’ and the modality of the ‘perhaps.’
Le Doeuff, Michèle (1948–)
Authors: Deutscher Max
Published: September 2018

Michèle le Doeuff has created new possibilities for philosophical writing. By working between philosophy and Shakespearean drama, social history and personal letters, she demonstrates how philosophy’s concepts gather meaning by circulating between different forms of discourse. In so doing she takes up many of the main problems of philosophy, including the nature of the self, the possibility of philosophical ethics, and the place of women in society and in philosophy. She shows, too, how philosophy’s proper commitment to critical reasoning represses the role of imagery in its own creative thought; philosophy seems dedicated to achieving theoretical results beyond its means, and imagery is misused to disguise its inevitable incompleteness. The spectre of women, or of some other group typified as ‘irrational’ is used to reassure philosophy of its own integral rationality.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95)
Authors: Bernasconi Robert
Published: September 2018

In the 1930s Levinas helped to introduce the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to the French. Subsequently his work attained classic status in its own right for his attempt to explore the meaning of ethics from a phenomenological starting-point. In Totalité et infini (1961) (Totality and Infinity, 1969) Levinas locates the basis of ethics in the face-to-face relation where the Other puts me in question. My obligations to the Other are not contracted by me. They not only precede any debts I incur, but also go beyond anything I could possibly satisfy. In later works, most notably Autrement qu’être (1974) (Otherwise than Being, 1981) Levinas explores further the preconditions of this account, most especially by investigating the I that was said to be put in question in the encounter with the Other. In analyses that stretch phenomenology to its limits and beyond, Levinas finds alterity within the self.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1940–)
Authors: Fenves Peter
Published: September 2018

Jean-Luc Nancy has disclosed significant political and social dimensions to the general project of deconstructing Western philosophy. Existence does not precede essence, according to Nancy; existence is without essence, and it is therefore impossible both to represent existence and to exist alone. Being is always ’being in common’. The task of philosophy consists in rethinking the commonality of being without relying on any prior conception of identity, unity or wholeness. ’Being in common’ means that nothing – no substance, no identifiable trait– is held in common. The absence of a common substance or spiritual identity does not then generate a command to make up for this lack by means of socially useful work. As the exposure of each singularity to its ungrounded commonality, ’being in common’ is the always surprising ’fact’ upon which all of Nancy’s investigations into philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and political phenomena are oriented.
Postmodernism, French critics of
Authors: Lilly Reginald
Published: September 2018

French anti-postmodernism emerged with the generation of philosophers that came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and counts among its ranks some of the most visible and prolific young scholars in France. Unlike schools of thought such as phenomenology, existentialism or Marxism, French anti-postmodernism has no founding figure, central text or core doctrine; anti-postmodernism (a term seldom, if ever, used by the French) therefore is less a philosophical school than a characterization for a diverse group of thinkers who react against those trends that have dominated French intellectual life since the Second World War, especially Marxism, structuralism, existentialism and deconstruction. These trends, grouped together under the heading of ‘postmodernism’, are seen by anti-postmodernists as the last episodes in a failed intellectual adventure whose origins go back at least to the French Revolution.

Critical of nineteenth-century philosophy as having produced, on the one hand, totalizing, speculative philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, and, on the other hand, the anti-rationalism of Nietzsche and his postmodern scions, anti-postmodernists (or neo-moderns as the French prefer to say) represent a return to the concept of the individual and of history as the product of free human agency. Reaffirming the efficacy of public, rational discourse, they tend to be interested in political philosophy, taking democracy and its ideals as a model for raising and addressing philosophical issues. Pluralist in their outlook, they value the disciplinary structure of scholarly work; fields such as epistemology, theology, philosophy of science and the history of ideas which were neglected or marginalized by much postmodern thought have enjoyed renewed prestige and interest among the anti-postmodernists.
Subject, postmodern critique of
Authors: Hengehold Laura
Published: September 2018

The critique of the subject in late twentieth-century continental philosophy is associated primarily with the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Deleuze. Driven by philosophical, political and therapeutic concerns, these thinkers question the subject’s ability to declare itself self-evidently independent of the external conditions of its own possibility, such as the language in which it expresses clear and distinct ideas, the body whose deceptions it fears, and the historical or cultural conditions in which it perceives reason or tyranny. Moreover, they fear that the ethical price of such insistence upon absolute self-possession is the exclusion and oppression of social groups whose supposed irrationality or savagery represent the self’s own rejected possibilities for change and discovery. Their work draws upon Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean insights concerning the dependence of consciousness upon its material conditions, unconscious roots, or constituting ‘outside’. However, their use of these influences is guided by a common fidelity to Kant’s search for the ‘conditions of possibility’ underlying subjective experience, as well as his scepticism regarding our capacity to know the self and its motivations as objects ‘in themselves’.
Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich (1871–1944)
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer
Published: September 2018

A luminary of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Bulgakov moved from Marxism, to idealism, to Christianity in the early twentieth century. He rejected historical determinism, class struggle and all theories of progress that accept the suffering of one generation as a bridge to the happiness of another. He regarded the abolition of poverty as a moral imperative, insisted that Christianity mandates political and social reform, and wanted to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would permeate every area of Russian life. His most important philosophical works, Filosofiia khoziaistva, chast’ pervaia (The Philosophy of the Economy, Part I) (1912) and Svet nevechernyi (Unfading Light) (1917), reflect his turn to a Solov’ëvian mysticism which apotheosized transfiguration, Sophia and Godmanhood (Bogochelovechestvo). Bulgakov saw the cosmos as an organic whole, animated and structured by a World Soul, an entelechy that he called Sophia, Divine Wisdom. Sophia mediates between God and his creation, working mysteriously through human beings. In emigration, Bulgakov developed new interpretations of Orthodox dogmatics and participated in the ecumenical movement. His lifelong concerns were the Church in the world and the interconnection of religion and life. His writings on contemporary political, social and cultural issues helped inspire the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance.
Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich (1794–1856)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia’s whence and whither: that is to say, the meaning of Russian history, the character of Russian national identity, and the possible, or necessary, paths of Russian historical development in the future. However, Chaadaev’s answer to these questions was mostly negative: he defined Russia not by what it was, but by what it was not.

A paradoxical feature of Chaadaev’s s position was that his general philosophical views did not apply to his native country. He was a convinced Westernizer, identifying Western development with universal human history, but Russia was in his view the opposite of the West, an exception to the general rules. His general social philosophy, deeply influenced by the French theocratic traditionalists, was inherently conservative, stressing the importance of supra-individual unity and of continuous historical traditions; in contrast with this, his philosophy of Russian history defined Russia as a country without unity and without history, thus lacking the basic conditions for a genuine conservatism. This view provoked a strong reaction among Russian Romantic conservatives: they accepted some aspects of Chaadaev’s conservative critique of atomistic individualism but tried to refute his pessimistic view of Russia, by arguing that, in fact, not Russia but the West represented atomistic disintegration and incapacity for organic development.
Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1812–70)
Authors: Kelly Aileen
Published: September 2018

Lauded by Nietzsche as ‘a man of every distinctive talent’ and admired by Lenin as the founder of the Russian revolutionary movement, Herzen eludes all neat categorizations. As a moral preacher he stands alongside Tolstoi and Dostoevskii (who praised him as a poet). As a philosopher, he was the principal interpreter and popularizer of Hegel’s thought in Russia in the first half of the 1840s, while the rebellion against metaphysical systems in his mature work has led him to be seen as a precursor of existentialism. Through the Russian press that he founded in emigration he helped to shape the beginnings of a public opinion in his country and played a major role in debates on Russia’s political future on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, while laying the foundations of the Russian populist movement through his writings on Russian socialism. He is best known in the West for his memoirs, Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts) (1861, 1866), which rank among the great works of Russian literature, and for S togo berega (From the Other Shore) (1850), the most brilliant and original of the works in which he expresses his rejection of all teleological conceptions of history.
Lavrov, Pëtr Lavrovich (1823–1900)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Pëtr Lavrov was one of the main theorists of Russian populism (narodnichestvo) – a trend of thought and a movement which crystallized after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861.

There were many different currents within this broad trend but all of them concentrated on the possibility and desirability of securing a non-capitalist way of development for Russia. This was so because the populists, having perceived (often with the help of Marx’s Capital) the contradictions of capitalist development, lost their confidence in ‘European’ progress, recognized in capitalism only a regression and chose therefore an adamantly anti-capitalist stand, combined, as a rule, with backward-looking idealization of the peasant commune.

The dominant Western theories of social evolution – from Spencerian liberalism to Marxism – strongly emphasized the ‘objective’ character of the laws of social development and defined capitalism as a necessary phase of progress. Russian populist socialists deeply felt that in Russia’s backward condition such theories offered a convenient tool for apologists of capitalist progress, who sanctioned and justified the suffering of the masses by referring to the ’objective laws of history’ or ‘the iron laws of political economy’. This led them to a demonstrative rejection of the ’objectivist’ conception of progress. Lavrov was the first populist theorist who set against ’objectivism’ a conscious and systematic vindication of ’subjectivism’. He was supported in this by another populist thinker, Nikolai Mikhailovskii. The common features of their views have been labelled ’subjective sociology’ or the ’subjective method’.
Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1842–1904)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Along with Lavrov, N.K. Mikhailovskii, a non-academic social theorist and literary critic, was the most representative and influential thinker of Russian populism. His most distinctive contribution to populist ideology was his attempt to reconcile the ’principle of individuality’, so dear to the Russian intelligentsia, with the old, communal ’principles of the people’, represented by the non-Westernized Russian peasantry. Unlike Herzen and Lavrov, Mikhailovskii did not see the principle of individuality as a product of Western progress, that is to say, as something which should be introduced from outside to the archaic world of Russian village commune. He challenged the stereotype which associated individualism with the capitalist West; instead, he tried to prove that the principle of individuality was in fact fully compatible with old Russian communalism, and incompatible with Western-type modernization. He did so by a radical redefinition of the very concept of individuality. For him individuality was not the product of a process of ’individualization’ in the sense of loosening the communal bonds, making people socially differentiated, functionally specialized and separated from each other. On the contrary, by individuality he meant the ’inner wholeness’, that is to say, the non-alienated, many-sided and harmonious development of human beings. Following the romantic critics of modernity, he claimed that individuality, so conceived, was being destroyed by capitalist progress.

Mikhailovskii’s notion of individuality was similar to the Slavophile ideal of ’integral personality’. Unlike Slavophilism, however, Mikhailovskii’s ‘sociological romanticism’ was bound up with a secularist worldview and a semi-positivist position in philosophy. For this reason its affinity with Slavophile romantic anticapitalism was relatively inconsequential and remained unnoticed.
Rozanov, Vasilii Vasil’evich (1856–1919)
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer
Published: September 2018

Vasilii Rozanov, a prominent spokesman of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, is known for his writings on sex, marriage and the family, his attacks on Christian asceticism, and his love–hate attitude to Judaism. He termed Judaism a religion of life because it sanctified sex and the family, and Christianity a religion of death because it exalted celibacy. But Rozanov also charged that Judaism mandated ritual murder and that Jews were feeding off Russians. In Apokalypsis nashego vremeni (The Apocalypse of Our Time) (1917–18), he apologized for his anti-Semitic pronouncements and blamed the Bolshevik Revolution on Christian otherworldliness and sexlessness. In private life, Rozanov was a pillar of the Church, which he regarded as a haven of beauty, warmth, and spiritual succour.

Rozanov’s writings contain brilliant insights, contradictions, distortions and outright lies. ‘Falsehood never tormented me’, he wrote, ‘and for a strange reason. What business is it of yours precisely what I think?’ He championed conservative policies in articles published under his own name and radical policies under a pseudonym. It is clear, however, that Rozanov was deeply religious and that he associated sex and the family with God. ’Dirty diapers and a naked wife: this is the truth of Bethlehem around you.’

Rozanov’s interpretations of Dostoevskii, Gogol’ and other Russian authors were original and perceptive. His collections of aphorisms Solitaria (1912) and Opavshie list’ia (Fallen Leaves, 2 vols) (1913b, 1915), are considered masterpieces of Russian style.
Solov’ëv, Vladimir Sergeevich (1853–1900)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

It has been widely acknowledged that Vladimir Solov’ëv is the greatest Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century; his significance for Russian philosophy is often compared to the significance of Aleksandr Pushkin for Russian poetry. His first works marked the beginning of the revolt against positivism in Russian thought, followed by a revival of metaphysical idealism and culminating in the so-called Religious-Philosophical Renaissance of the early twentieth century.

Unlike the Russian idealists of the Romantic epoch, Solov’ëv was a professional, systematic philosopher. He created the first all-round philosophical system in Russia and thus inaugurated the transition to the construction of systems in Russian philosophical thought. At the same time he remained faithful to the Russian intellectual tradition of reluctance to engage in purely theoretical problems; his ideal of ‘integrality’ postulated that theoretical philosophy be organically linked to religion and social practice. He saw himself not as an academic philosopher, but rather as a prophet, discovering the way to universal regeneration.

One of the main themes of Solov’ëv’s philosophy of history was Russia’s mission in universal history. Owing to this he was interested in the ideas of the Slavophiles and, in the first period of his intellectual evolution, established close relations with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavic circle of Ivan Aksakov. He was close also to Dostoevskii, on whom he made a very deep impression. At the beginning of the 1880s he began to dissociate himself from the epigones of Slavophilism; his final break with them came in 1883, when he became a contributor to the liberal and Westernizing Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger). The main reason for this was the pro-Catholic tendency of his thought, which led him to believe that Russia had to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. In his view, this was a necessary condition of fulfilling Russia’s universal mission, defined as the unification of the Christian Churches and the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of God on earth.

In the early 1890s Solov’ëv abandoned this utopian vision and concentrated on working out an autonomous ethic and a liberal philosophy of law. This reflected his optimistic faith in liberal progress and his confidence that even the secularization of ethics was essentially a part of the divine–human process of salvation. In the last year of his life, however, historiosophical optimism gave way to a pessimistic apocalypticism, as expressed in his philosophical dialogue Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (1900), and especially the ’Tale of the Antichrist’ appended to it.
Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910)
Authors: Morson Gary Saul
Published: September 2018

Tolstoi expressed philosophical ideas in his novels Voina i mir (War and Peace) (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–7), which are often regarded as the summit of realism, as well as in shorter fictional works, such as Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (The Death of Ivan Il’ich) (1886), often praised as the finest novella in European literature. In addition, he wrote numerous essays and tracts on religious, moral, social, educational and aesthetic topics, most notably ‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’ (’What Is Art?’) (1898), Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God Is Within You) (1893) and his autobiographical meditation ’Ispoved’’ (A Confession) (1884).

Tolstoi apparently used his essays, letters and diaries to explore ideas by stating them in their most extreme form, while his fiction developed them with much greater subtlety. Critics have discerned a sharp break in his work: an earlier period, in which he produced the two great novels, is dominated by deep scepticism; and a later period following the existential trauma and subsequent conversion experience described in ’Ispoved’’. Tolstoi stressed the radical contingency of events, valued practical over theoretical reasoning, and satirized any and all overarching systems. After 1880, he assumed the role of a prophet, claiming to have found the true meaning of Christianity. He ‘edited’ the Gospels by keeping only those passages containing the essence of Christ’s teaching and dismissed the rest as so many layers of falsification imposed by ecclesiastics. Tolstoi preached pacifism, anarchism, vegetarianism, passive resistance to evil (a doctrine that influenced Gandhi), a radical asceticism that would have banned sex even within marriage, and a theory of art that rejected most classic authors, including the plays of Shakespeare and Tolstoi’s own earlier novels.
Hegelianism, Russian
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

In Russian intellectual history the so-called ‘remarkable decade’ of 1838–48 (P.V. Annenkov’s expression) could be characterized as a truly ‘philosophical epoch’. Speculative philosophy was seen by then as directly relevant to all important questions of national existence. A similar situation obtained then, in exactly the same years, in the lands of partitioned Poland. In both countries all philosophical discussions revolved around Hegel, whose system was perceived as the culminating point in the development of Western philosophy. In Russia the fascination with Hegelianism was widespread and profound, reaching distant provincial centres and leaving its mark on literature. ‘Philosophical notions’, wrote Ivan Kireevskii in 1845, ’have become quite commonplace here now. There is scarcely a person who does not use philosophical terminology, nor any young man who is not steeped in reflections on Hegel’. Herzen provides an identical testimony. Hegel’s works, he wrote,

were discussed incessantly; there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetics, the Encyclopaedia and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit’, or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on the ’absolute personality and its existence in itself’.

(Herzen [1853] 1968: 398)

This vivid reception of Hegelianism was a socially important phenomenon, meeting several deep-seated psychological demands of the young Russian intelligentsia. First, as in Germany, speculative idealism provided the intelligentsia with a sort of compensation for the paralysis of public life under authoritarian government. Second, Hegelian philosophy was welcomed as an antidote to introspective day-dreaming and attitudes of Romantic revolt; in this context Hegelianism was largely interpreted as a philosophy of ’reconciliation with reality’. Somewhat later this conservative interpretation of Hegelianism was replaced by a Left-Hegelian philosophy of rational and conscious action; at this stage Hegelianism came to be a powerful instrument in the struggle against Slavophile conservative Romanticism. Both as a philosophy of reconciliation and as a philosophy of action Russian Hegelianism was above all a philosophy of reintegration; a philosophy which helped young intellectuals in overcoming their feeling of alienation and in building bridges between their ideals and reality.
Liberalism, Russian
Authors: Hamburg G.M.
Published: September 2018

Unlike early English liberalism which stressed individual freedom from state control and from the ‘tyranny of the majority’, Russian liberalism generally emphasized the importance of legality in government, the state’s positive role as guarantor of civil liberty, and the gradual achievement of social justice through reform. In the century between Peter the Great’s death in 1725 and the Decembrist uprising of 1825 various politicians and thinkers proposed the introduction of representative institutions into the Russian government and recommended that serfdom be abolished in the Empire. These proposals reflected admiration for Western European models of government and the impact of the Enlightenment on Russia’s ruling elite. Because the autocracy ultimately rejected these proposals and made public discussion of them all but impossible, liberalism did not take root in this period. The genesis of Russian liberalism as a philosophically elaborated, politically coherent movement occurred after the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, when the government eased censorship and announced its commitment to peasant emancipation. Mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberalism owed its intellectual inspiration to Hegelianism and French juste-milieu liberalism. Russian liberals argued that social progress in the empire had almost always come about at the state’s initiative; they could scarcely imagine building a just society without the cooperation of a strong state.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Russian liberals confronted what proved to be an insuperable challenge: how to establish a viable constitutional order in an empire riven by social and ethnic strife where neither government nor the powerful socialist movement favoured a rule-of-law state. Wrestling with this difficulty, the liberals split into two factions: a ‘left’ or ‘radical’ wing that valued social justice over the sanctity of property rights; and a ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ wing that valued legal equality over social equality, and therefore interpreted socialism as a species of utopianism. Between 1905 and 1917 the liberal movement reached its political zenith, as liberal politicians exercised their influence in the State Duma and opposition movement. Following the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution liberalism was banned in the Soviet Union. It re-emerged, albeit in altered form, during communism’s collapse when neo-liberals claimed for liberalism a prominent position in the ‘normal’ constellation of Russian political forces. The main goals of post-Soviet liberalism are the defence of civil and political rights, the establishment of the rule of law, the assertion of individual property rights and the gradual construction of a market economy.
Russian Materialism: ‘the 1860s’
Authors: Scanlan James P.
Published: September 2018

No tradition of philosophical materialism existed in Russia until the years conventionally called ‘the 1860s’ – roughly, the period from the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 to the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866. During that time philosophical freethinking, under the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment and the contemporaneous influence of post-Hegelian German materialism, came together with political radicalism to create a major social and intellectual movement with a broadly materialist philosophical foundation.

The theoretical underpinnings of the movement were elaborated in Russia (as far as tsarist censorship would permit) by Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Dmitrii Pisarev, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Ivan Sechenov and others, and more freely in emigration by Mikhail Bakunin. Their ‘materialism’ was less a precisely articulated ontological position than a grand, science-worshipping worldview that sought to undermine both religion and the state; its elements included naturalism and universal causal determinism in metaphysics, empiricism in epistemology, reductionism in the philosophy of mind, ‘rational egoism’ in ethics, revolutionary socialism in political philosophy and realism in aesthetics. Because of their extreme opposition to established authority and traditional values, the representatives of this movement came to be called ‘nihilists’, and under that name they were portrayed in best-selling novels of the day by Ivan Turgenev and Fëdor Dostoevskii.

Government repression after 1866 put an end to the open development of this materialist movement, but the writings of its leaders proved to be an inspiration to Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin, the founders of Russian Marxism. Under Communism, the materialists of ‘the 1860s’ were honoured in Russia as great philosophers and important precursors of Marx.
Positivism, Russian
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Positivism in Russia was not a separate, well-defined philosophical school but, rather, a broad, multidisciplinary current of thought, characterized by a cult of ‘positive science’, commitment to scientific, empirical methods and rejection of the metaphysical tradition in philosophy. As a rule, Russian positivists sympathized with materialism, although distanced themselves from the metaphysical assumptions of materialist philosophy. Their philosophical aspirations were usually limited to the investigation of specific problems, but their optimistic belief in the power of science could push them in the direction of an all-embracing ‘scientific philosophy’.

In accordance with the naturalistic evolutionism of the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific philosophy involved the conception of objective laws of development and biological and/or sociological relativism – both incompatible with the ethicist standpoint. Many Russian thinkers, especially the so-called ‘subjective sociologists’, tried to combine positivist scientism with ethicism, claiming an independent status for moral values. Their efforts, however, could be successful only at the expense of abandoning the scientific rigour demanded by consistent positivists. Hence their views were semi-positivist rather than positivist. Through undermining the arrogant self-confidence and monopolistic claims of the crude forms of positivistic scientism, they paved the way for the outspoken revolt against positivism at the end of the 1890s.
Eurasian movement
Authors: Riasanovsky Nicholas V.
Published: September 2018

The Eurasian movement was a creation of émigré Russian intellectuals following the First World War and the October Revolution. The ideology of Eurasianism was formally proclaimed in 1921. It obtained considerable development, prominence, distinction and notoriety in the two following decades, essentially running its course by the time of the Second World War. Eurasianism attracts attention because of the novelty and originality of its central argument, proposing that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union constituted an independent organic entity separate from both Europe and Asia, called Eurasia (it was the complete separation from Europe that represented an explosive novelty), and because of the intellectual variety and abilities, at times brilliance, of its proponents. Also, as an extraordinary phenomenon in Russian intellectual history, it demands explanation.
Medieval philosophy, Russian
Authors: Farrimond Claire
Published: September 2018

The term ‘philosophy’ is itself highly problematic in the context of medieval Russia. Even in its most literal sense of love of learning, it was regarded with ambivalence, its devotees risking persecution. At the same time, Russia at any given point in the Middle Ages possessed what can best be described as a self-consciousness, a sense of its own destiny. Arising from the unusual circumstances of its Conversion in 988, this consciousness continues to draw heavily on Byzantium, with Russia at first in a dependent role but later, following Constantinople’s fall, assuming that of the proud successor. The centrality of the Christian element to medieval Russian thought is underlined by the continuing significance both of the monastic movement and of its ancient cradle, Kiev, even as Moscow was being extolled as the Third Rome.
Nietzsche: impact on Russian thought
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer
Published: September 2018

Nietzsche’s thought had a massive influence on Russian literature and the arts, religious philosophy and political culture. His popularizers were writers, artists and political radicals who read his works through the prism of their own culture, highlighting the moral, psychological and mythopoetic aspects of his thought and their sociopolitical implications, and appropriating them for their own agendas. Literature addressed to a mass readership disseminated crude notions of a master morality and an amoral Superman.

Russians discovered Nietzsche in the early 1890s. His admirers regarded him as a proponent of self-fulfilment and an enemy of the ‘’slave morality’ of Christianity. Two of them, Dmitri Merezhkovskii (1865–1941) and Maksim Gor’kii (real name Aleksei Peshkov, 1868–1936), were the progenitors of the two main streams of Nietzsche appropriation – the religious and the secular. Merezhkovskii was the initiator of Russian Symbolism. In 1896 he began trying to reconcile Nietzsche and Christianity; this attempt led him to propound an apocalyptic Christianity in 1900 and to found the Religious-Philosophical Society of St Petersburg (1901–3, 1906–17). Its members, the so-called God-seekers, included artists and intellectuals who were also attracted to Nietzsche. As for Gor’kii, his early short stories featured vagrant protagonists who personified crude versions of the slave and the master morality. In 1895 Gor’kii began to dream of a Russian Superman who would lead the masses in a struggle for liberation and imbue them with respect for Man, which he always wrote with a capital letter. During the Revolution of 1905, he and Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875–1933), a Bolshevik admirer of Nietzsche, constructed a Marxist surrogate religion to inspire heroism and self-sacrifice. They believed, as did most Symbolists and some philosophers, that art could transform human consciousness.

New literary schools emerged after 1909. The Futurists exaggerated Nietzsche’s anti-rationalism, anti-historicism and cultural iconoclasm. The Acmeists propounded a non-tragic Apollonian Christianity and idealized classical antiquity and ‘world culture’. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Nietzsche was considered an ideologue of reaction and his books were removed from the People’s Libraries, but his ideas, not identified as such, continued to circulate and pervaded Soviet literature, the arts and political culture.
Lopatin, Lev Mikailovich (1855–1920)
Authors: Poole Randall A.
Published: September 2018

In 1911 the Moscow Psychological Society celebrated the accomplishments of Lev Lopatin, a major Russian idealist and personalist philosopher. Lopatin was lauded for his chairmanship of the Psychological Society, the oldest learned society ‘uniting the philosophical forces of Russia’, and for his contributions to Russian philosophy: to the critique of positivism, to the development of Russian philosophical language and the history of philosophy in Russia, to the defence of idealism through his theories of ‘creative causation’ and the soul’s substantiality, to philosophical psychology, and to the strength and independence of Russian philosophic culture. Twenty-five years earlier the appearance of the first volume of Lopatin’s main work, Polozhitel’nye zadachi filosofii (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), was indeed a milestone in the philosophical revolt against positivism and the development of Russian neo-idealism. In this and subsequent works Lopatin advanced his ‘system of concrete spiritualism’. His idea of the person as an ontologically grounded spiritual entity relates him to Leibniz’s monadology, and he is regarded as one of the main representatives of ‘neo-Leibnizianism’ in Russia, following Aleksei Kozlov. Another source of his ideas was his long-time friend the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv, despite certain philosophical differences between them.
Vernadskii, Vladimir Ivanovich (1863–1945)
Authors: Poole Randall A.
Published: September 2018

Vladimir Vernadskii was an earth scientist with broad scientific and philosophical interests. He made important contributions to mineralogy and crystallography, distinguished himself as one of the founders of modern geochemistry, and pioneered the new science of biogeochemistry. His key concepts of ‘living matter’, the ‘biosphere’, and the ‘noosphere’ reflect his holistic search for a natural philosophy that would integrate life, including humanity and its culture, into a unified picture of earth and cosmos. Vernadskii was the first Russian scientist to appreciate the immense implications of the discovery of radioactivity. He helped mobilize his country’s efforts to acquire atomic energy, while urging full awareness (especially among scientists) of the dangers atomic power posed for mankind. Since the 1960s, his work has been an inspiration for the environmentalist movement and ecology in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Vernadskii was also an influential historian and philosopher of science. His liberal philosophy of science is an ardent defence of the principle of freedom of thought, based on a keen appreciation of the intricate connection among science, philosophy, religion, and other forms of human culture. In his broad scientific humanism, commitment to liberal democracy and faith in human perfectibility, Vernadskii has often been compared to Andrei Sakharov.
Russian philosophy of law
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Russian thought is rarely associated with philosophy of law. The intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Russia are known rather for their uncompromising critique of legalism, passing sometimes into a genuine ‘legal nihilism’. Indeed, both right-wing and left-wing Russian thinkers – the Slavophiles and Dostoevskii on the one hand, the populists and anarchists (from Bakunin to Tolstoi) on the other – saw modern rational law as an instrument of egoistic bourgeois individualism, destroying the values of communal collectivism still preserved among the Russian peasantry. This attitude found expression not only in different forms of programmatic anti-capitalism but also in a tendency to discredit civil rights and political liberty as a mere mask for capitalist exploitation. Capitalist development and the juridicization of social bonds it involved were perceived as something peculiar to the West, coming to Russia from without and as such not worthy of acceptance. Law and legal rights were criticized in Russia from many quarters and for various reasons: in defence of an idealized autocracy or in defence of true freedom, on behalf of the Russian soul or on behalf of universal progress towards socialism, in the name of Christ or in the name of Marx. In this manner right-wing and left-wing Russian intellectuals supported one another in creating a peculiar tradition of the censure of law.

However, it would be wrong to draw from these facts a conclusion of an inherent hostility between the ‘Russian mind’ and the ‘spirit of law’. The ‘juridical world-view’ of the Enlightenment was well represented in imperial Russia. The modernizing Russian autocrats – Peter the Great and Catherine the Great – believed firmly in the power of rational legislation and won admiration from among leading European thinkers (Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot) fir setting a good example for Western monarchs. The first radical critic of Russian autocracy, Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802), was in turn a theorist of natural law, a firm believer in inalienable human rights, and an enthusiastic worshipper of the American constitution. Under the reign of Alexander I (1801–25), who himself thought seriously about the introduction of constitutional rule in Russia, admiration for law was very strong among Russia’s intellectual elite. Radischchev’s disciples, Ivan Pnin and Vasilii Popugaev, inspired also by the Scottish Enlightenment, advocated the idea of a ‘civil society’ with a developed system of private law and legally safeguarded human rights. Nikita Murav’ev and Pavel Pestel, ideological leaders of the two trends within the Decembrist movement (named so after the abortive uprising of December l825), expressed their ideas in the form of detailed constitutional projects. A common feature of these projects, otherwise very different, was a pronounced juridical rationalism, sharply contrasting with all variants of a sceptical attitude towards law.