bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Williamson, Timothy (1955–)
Authors: Ball Brian
Published: September 2018

Timothy Williamson is a British analytic philosopher, who has made major contributions in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology.

Williamson has defended classical logic in connection with the sorites (or heap) paradox, by appeal to epistemicism, the view that vagueness is ignorance. His knowledge first approach has reversed the traditional order of explanation in epistemology. In metaphysics, he has argued in favour of necessitism – the view that what there is (ontology) is metaphysically necessary, not contingent. In the philosophy of language, he has argued that one must (in a certain privileged sense, constitutive of assertion) assert only what one knows; and he has defended a principle of charity according to which the best interpretations of a language maximize the attribution of knowledge (rather than true belief) to its speakers.

Methodologically, Williamson opposes naturalism and defends instead the use of ‘armchair’ methods to answer substantive questions; in practice, his work is often characterized by the application of formal techniques, both logical and mathematical, to traditional philosophical problems.
Brouwer, L.E.J. (1881–1966)
Authors: van Atten Mark
Published: September 2018

L.E.J. Brouwer was a mathematician and philosopher. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1907 and remained there, from 1913 to 1951, as full professor. Brouwer was a founding father of modern topology. In the foundations of mathematics he launched ‘intuitionism’: a mathematical ontology and epistemology, based on a philosophy of mind, that yields a form of constructive mathematics. Although intuitionism was designed as a Kantian approach, Brouwer’s conception of the intuition of time supports a much richer mathematics than Kant’s. Arguably, a closer affinity with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology transpired as the latter was being developed. A by-product of intuitionism, intuitionistic logic, found application independently of the foundational programme. Intuitionism presented the first full-scale alternative to classical mathematics and logic. Brouwer was also interested in mysticism, and in language reform in the service of spiritual and political progress.
Rancière, Jacques (1940–)
Authors: Davis Oliver
Published: September 2018

Jacques Rancière was born in Algiers in 1940 and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he participated in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s seminar reading Marx’s Capital in the mid-1960s. Rancière then taught in the Philosophy Department of the experimental Vincennes campus of the University of Paris and its successor institution, Paris 8. His work is rooted in a radically egalitarian critique of Althusser and other leading theorists of the French left, in particular philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and inspired by his singular encounter with the archives of the nineteenth-century French workers’ movement. Since his first publication in 1965 he has ranged widely across philosophy, politics, history, historiography, pedagogy, literary studies, film studies and aesthetics. It is for his work on politics (his account of radical equality and his anti-foundationalist, anti-consensualist and anti-institutional critique of political theory) and aesthetics (his reformulation of Modernism as ‘the aesthetic regime of art’) and for writing which moves back and forward between these two domains that he is best known today. Rancière is sometimes described as a post-Marxist philosopher and his work likened to that of his contemporaries on the French theoretical left, Alain Badiou and Étienne Balibar.
Barthes, Roland (1915–80)
Authors: Risser James
Published: September 2018

In the field of contemporary literary studies, the French essayist and cultural critic Roland Barthes cannot be easily classified. His early work on language and culture was strongly influenced by the intellectual currents of existentialism and Marxism that were dominant in French intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Gradually his work turned more to semiology (a general theory of signs), which had a close association with the structuralist tradition in literary criticism. In his later work, Barthes wrote more as a post-structuralist than as a structuralist in an attempt to define the nature and authority of a text. Throughout his writings Barthes rejected the ‘naturalist’ view of language, which takes the sign as a representation of reality. He maintained that language is a dynamic activity that dramatically affects literary and cultural practices.
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 conceptions of being. It is a philosophy of the event, a state where sense arises independently of lived experience or scientific fact. The event is a sign without a signifier-signified relationship; a form of content that consists of a complex of forces that are not separable from their form of expression; an 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 that common sense 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 of connections without the unity that could pinpoint or identify a subject or an object. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other, though in no fixed order and without 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 not a model, but consists of lines of escape from from rooted, tree-like structures that open up the route for encounters and makes philosophy into cartography, that is, the mapping of concepts.
Irigaray, Luce (1930–)
Authors: Chanter Tina
Published: September 2018

Luce Irigaray holds doctorates in both linguistics and philosophy, and has practised as a psychoanalyst for many years. Author of over twenty books, she has established a reputation as a pre-eminent theorist of sexual difference – a term she would prefer to ‘feminist’. The latter carries with it the history of feminism as a struggle for equality, whereas Irigaray sees herself more as a feminist of difference, emphasizing the need to differentiate women from men over and above the need to establish parity between the sexes.

Speculum de l’autre femme (1974) (Speculum of the Other Woman) (1985), the book that earned her international recognition, fuses philosophy with psychoanalysis, and employs a lyrical ‘mimesis’, or mimicry, that parodies and undercuts philosophical pretensions to universality. While adopting the standpoint of universality, objectivity and uniformity, the philosophical tradition in fact reflects a partial view of the world, one which is informed by those largely responsible for writing it: men. Without the material, maternal and nurturing succour provided by women as mothers and homemakers, men would not have had the freedom to reflect, the peace to think, or the time to write the philosophy that has shaped our culture. As such, women are suppressed and unacknowledged; femininity is the unthought ground of philosophy – philosophy’s other.
Kristeva, Julia (1941–)
Authors: Chanter Tina
Published: September 2018

Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva entered the Parisian scene of avant-garde intellectuals in the 1960s. Her earliest work in linguistics was shaped by the post-Stalinist communism of eastern Europe, a political climate that exerts its influence on her entire corpus, even as she distanced herself from it, to embrace an increasingly psychoanalytic perspective. Dissatisfied with scientific models of language, conceived as a mere means of communicating preconceived ideas, where words simply function as isolated symbols that represent discrete concepts, Kristeva analyses language as a signifying process. As such, language is not a static and closed system of signs, but a mobile, fluid process that implicates bodily and vocal rhythms in the generation of symbolic meanings. In La Révolution du language poétique (1974) (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984) Kristeva fuses linguistic insights with psychoanalytic inquiry as she presents two distinct yet interrelated aspects of the signifying process, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic aspect of language is vocal, pre-verbal, rhythmic, kinetic and bodily. The symbolic aspect of language is social, cultural, and rule-governed. Focusing on the interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva is able to analyse literary and historical texts, works of art and cultural phenomena in a way that thematizes the complex relationship between materiality and representation.
Lacan, Jacques (1901–81)
Authors: Brockelman Thomas
Published: September 2018

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and philosopher whose contribution to philosophy derives from his consistent and thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Freud’s writings in the light of Heidegger and Hegel as well as structuralist linguistics and anthropology. Whereas Freud himself had disparaged philosophical speculation, claiming for himself the mantle of the natural scientist, Lacan demonstrates psychoanalysis to be a rigorous philosophical position. Specifically, Lacan suggests that the Freudian unconscious is best understood as the effect of language (what he calls, ‘the symbolic’) upon human behaviour.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1940–2007)
Authors: Scibilia Giovanni
Published: September 2018

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is Professor of Philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg and Berkeley. At the centre of his thought is philosophy’s ostracism of literature, which in his view characterizes the foundational scene of philosophy itself. Lacoue-Labarthe demonstrates how all Western thought, including Heidegger (perhaps its most faithful deconstructor) lies within a conception of mimesis which is still metaphysical in that it remains bound to the opposition between truth and mimesis: an ‘imitation’ alters (or falsifies) its original, thus contrasting with that which is ‘true’. The non-metaphysical thought of mimesis proposed by Lacoue-Labarthe, by contrast, shows how a mimetic aspect structures the concept of truth itself, making it impossible to distinguish between truth and verisimilitude, model and copy. Thus a new area of investigation is laid open concerning fictional modes of thought: the manner in which myths and figures are produced.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1936–)
Authors: Lionnet Francoise
Published: September 2018

Tzvetan Todorov is a Bulgarian thinker and literary theorist who lives and works in France. His thought is ‘structuralist’ in that it seeks stable abstract principles explanatory of, but not directly given in, phenomena of literature and history. His thought is not only a milestone in the history of structuralism but is ‘negatively’ important to the development of post-structuralist thought: the rules and oppositions conveyed by structuralist typologies such as those of Todorov constitute much of what thinkers such as Jacques Derrida seek to ‘deconstruct’.
Alterity and identity, postmodern theories of
Authors: Fenves Peter
Published: September 2018

Theories of alterity and identity can be said to be ‘postmodern’ if they challenge at least two key features of modern philosophy: (1) the Cartesian attempt to secure the legitimacy of knowledge on the basis of a subject that immediately knows itself and (2) the Hegelian attempt to secure self-knowledge and self-recognition by showing that knowledge and recognition are mediated by the whole. Postmodern thought does not necessarily champion a wholly other, but it generally conceives of self-identity in terms of a radical alterity.
Genealogy
Authors: Hill R. Kevin
Published: September 2018

‘Genealogy’ is an expression that has come into currency since the 1970s, a result of Michel Foucault’s works Surveiller et punir (1975) (Discipline and Punish, 1977) and The History of Sexuality (1976, 1984a, 1984b). Foucault’s use of the term continues Nietzsche’s in his On the Genealogy of Morals ([1887] 1967). For both philosophers, genealogy is a form of historical critique, designed to overturn our norms by revealing their origins. Whereas Nietzsche’s method relies on psychological explanations, and attacks modern conceptions of equality in favour of a perfectionist ethic, Foucault’s relies on micro-sociological explanations, and attacks modern forms of domination in favour of radical politics.
Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1874–1948)
Authors: Scanlan James P.
Published: September 2018

Nikolai Berdiaev, Russian religious idealist, was one of many non-Marxist thinkers expelled from Russia by communist authorities in 1922. Although attracted to Marxism in his youth, even then he tempered it with a Neo-Kantian ethical theory. Well before the Bolshevik Revolution, he became seriously disenchanted with Marxist philosophy (though not with the idea of socialism) and embarked on the career of elaborating a personalistic Christian philosophy that occupied him for the rest of his life.

Dubbed ‘the philosopher of freedom’, Berdiaev wrote prolifically on that subject and on related topics in metaphysics, philosophy of history, ethics, social philosophy and other fields (but not epistemology, which he rejected as a fruitless exercise in scepticism). Because his approach to philosophy was admittedly anthropocentric and subjective, he accepted the label ‘existentialist’ and acknowledged his kinship with Dostoevskii, Nietzsche and (to a lesser degree) Jaspers. Like them, he constructed no philosophical system, though he did expound views that were coherently interrelated in the main, if impressionistically and sometimes obscurely expressed. Among his more prominent ideas were his conception of freedom (for which he was indebted to the mystical philosophy of Jakob Boehme), his distinction between spirit and nature, his theory of ‘objectification’, his doctrine of creativity and his conception of time.

The most frequently translated of twentieth-century Russian thinkers, Berdiaev has been widely studied in the West since the 1930s, particularly in schools of religion and theology and by philosophers in the existentialist and personalist traditions. Although many Western readers considered him the voice of Russian Orthodox Christianity, his independent views drew fire from some Orthodox philosophers and theologians and also from strongly anti-Soviet Russian émigrés. His writings in emigration were eagerly embraced in his homeland once they could be published there, beginning in the late 1980s.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1873–1928)
Authors: Joravsky David
Published: September 2018

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, né Malinovskii, was a Russian thinker who helped Lenin create the Bolshevik or Communist Party, broke with Lenin over a mixture of philosophical and political issues, yet would not quit the Revolution. His life and thought illuminate the interaction of philosophy and politics within the tumultuous context of a ’developing’ country, which calls in question political philosophies that take for granted the conditions of ’developed’ countries.

Bogdanov never won such widespread interest as those dissident communists – Georg Lukács, most notably – who turned Marxism away from claims of science towards theories of consciousness and wilful action. Bogdanov sought a positivist basis for his philosophy of action or practice. He offered ’empiriomonism’ and ’organizational science’ to creators of a ’free collectivism’, but the creators of the Soviet system brushed him aside. He has been studied by scholars who wonder why the Russian Revolution – or twentieth-century revolutions in many developing countries – has failed to realize dreams of justice and freedom, and by a different cluster of scholars who conceive of a metascience that might unify the fragmented world of knowledge. Less known is Bogdanov’s sense of tragic contradictions in revolutionary pragmatism, as we may call active belief in Marx’s famous declaration that the point of philosophizing is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.
Mamardashvili, Merab Konstantinovich (1930–90)
Authors: Emerson Caryl
Published: September 2018

Merab Mamardashvili was one of the Soviet Union’s most influential thinkers in the fields of phenomenology and philosophy of consciousness. Although he preferred the Socratic genres of the dialogue, interview and philosophical meditation to the abstract rigours of more systematic philosophy, he left substantial published work on Descartes, Hegel, Kant and French literature (especially Proust).

Mamardashvili began his career as a historian of philosophy, with a series of close readings of Karl Marx. By the 1970s he had evolved his own distinctive style of ‘philosophizing out loud’, addressing the foundations of European philosophy based on Descartes and Kant, at the core of which was the search for the ‘free phenomenon’ (svobodnyi fenomen) or the ‘event of a thought’ (sobytie mysli). In Kantian fashion, Mamardashvili attended to those a priori conditions of lived experience which govern that moment when reality enters the transcendental realm – but he switched the emphasis: rather than the mental problems presented by the a priori moment, Mamardashvili concentrated on what he called a ‘metaphysics of the a posteriori’, that is, on the actual event, or advent, of a thought. Perhaps the single motivating question of his life was: ‘How is a new thought possible?’ Among his many answers, developed in public lectures and interviews during the last twenty years of his life, was the notion that the very processes of thought provoke ‘hearing a thought’ in another. From this follows his concern with dialogic forms and his interest in the Cartesian dualism of soul and body – not as a necessary truth but as a ‘productive tautology’ that makes internal reason and a ‘grammatical’ analysis of thinking possible on a palpable basis.
Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich (1879–1937)
Authors: Haardt Alexander
Published: September 2018

Gustav Shpet was the first Russian philosopher to take up Edmund Husserl’s idea of pure phenomenology as prima philosophia and develop it in several directions. Thus, in his most important phenomenological work Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and Sense) (1914), he outlined his ‘phenomenology of hermeneutic reason’ on the basis of Husserl’s Ideas 1. In this theoretical framework he formulated, between 1914 and 1918, hermeneutic and semiotic problems, which in the 1920s he elaborated more specifically within the fields of philosophy of language and theory of art. In doing so he took up ideas from other philosophical movements, particularly Dilthey’s hermeneutics and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language.

Shpet’s reception of phenomenology has to be seen in the context of Russian intellectual and cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Platonic ’Moscow Metaphysical School’ (which included V. Solov’ëv and S. Trubetskoi) provided the intellectual atmosphere in which his turn to Husserl’s phenomenology took place, and his ideas on theories of language and signs are close to ideas of the contemporary movement of Russian Formalism. Through his phenomenological and structural theories he influenced Prague structuralism via the ’Moscow Linguistic Circle’, and is seen as a precursor to Soviet Semiotics.
Skovoroda, Hryhorii Savych (1722–94)
Authors: Zakydalsky Taras D.
Published: September 2018

Skovoroda was the first truly independent philosopher produced by Ukraine and the last brilliant exponent of its Baroque culture. Departing from the Aristotelian tradition of the Kiev Academy, he constructed an original synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. Because of his classical aloofness from history, the sociopolitical trauma of Ukraine’s absorption by Russia, which he witnessed, is hardly reflected in his writings. His worldview foreshadows the Romantic and religious tendencies in nineteenth-century Ukrainian and Russian thought.
Vygotskii, Lev Semënovich (1896–1934)
Authors: Joravsky David
Published: September 2018

Vygotskii was a Soviet psychologist, the most comprehensive in creative reach and the most influential. Trained in literary studies and originally active as a critic, he took a post in a pedagogical institute and came thus to psychological science, with a special interest in child development. That was the period of foundational debates between rival schools of psychology, intensified in the Russian case by the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent campaign for a Marxist school. Vygotskii became the major theorist at the central Institute of Psychology. While dying of tuberculosis he worked his intensive way through contested claims to know what mind is and how it acts. His profuse reflections on that large contest remained largely unpublished for decades, while disciples echoed his call for a ’cultural-historical’ approach to a unified science of the mind, and actually worked on the mental development of children and the neuropsychology of brain damage. The concept of ’activity’, which was supposed to resolve philosophical issues, served largely to evade them, while harmonizing with Marxist-Leninist slogans on ‘practice’. Among Western cognitive psychologists Vygotskii acquired a tardy reputation as a pioneer who emphasized social interaction in the mental development of children. The publication of his major works in the 1970s and 1980s revealed a much broader theorist. His central theme was the obvious truth at the basis of each artistic and psychological school, the lure of an effort to unify all of them, and the present impossibility of achieving such unification within science, outside philosophical speculation.
Vysheslavtsev, Boris Petrovich (1877–1954)
Authors: Scanlan James P.
Published: September 2018

Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev, Russian idealist philosopher and religious thinker, was exiled from his homeland in 1922 because of his anti-Marxism (which he later elaborated in a full-fledged philosophical critique). In western Europe he became a leading figure in the Russian émigré philosophical community, lecturing and writing on questions of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology and social philosophy. Vysheslavtsev was particularly noted for his study (begun in an early work on the ethics of Fichte) of the irrational as the sphere of human contact with the Absolute. Subsequently he developed this theme through the application of concepts of depth psychology to ethics and to the interpretation of Christian doctrine.
Enlightenment, Russian
Authors: Jones W. Gareth
Published: September 2018

When Russia embraced secular European ways of thought under Peter the Great, its educated elite came into contact first with the German Enlightenment, which combined the rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz with the emotionalism of Protestant pietism. With its acknowledgement of established authority, and emphasis on a person’s responsibility to the community rather than individual rights, this strand of early Enlightenment thought suited the state-building of Peter.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, the universality of the French language, the influence of geniuses such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, and the formation of a conscious Enlightenment party among the French philosophes meant that their polemical writings carried the mainstream of progressive thought. It was this Enlightenment that was embraced by Catherine the Great, who professed its tenets: tolerance and the conviction that perfecting social organization would ensure human happiness. She encouraged the growth of an intellectual elite to spread the ideas of the philosophes and form an enlightened public opinion.

Russia’s tradition of absolutism and the institution of serfdom, however, proved inimical to Enlightenment values. Nevertheless, the Russian Enlightenment engendered an elite of individuals eager to act as critics and moral leaders of their society who would determine the future course of Russian social thought.
Pan-Slavism
Authors: Riasanovsky Nicholas V.
Published: September 2018

In B.H. Sumner’s words: ’Since Pan-Slavism was in general not so much an organized policy, or even a creed, but rather an attitude of mind and feeling, it was at the time correspondingly difficult to gauge its power, just as it is now to analyse its different elements’ (Sumner 1937). Logically and philosophically weak, and in fact usually deficient in any kind of intellectual structure, this identification with, preference for, and emphasis on the Slavs has, nevertheless, been a presence in European (and to a much lesser extent world) history ever since its emergence in early nineteenth century.
Signposts Movement
Authors: Kelly Aileen
Published: September 2018

The symposium Signposts (Vekhi, sometimes translated Landmarks), published in 1909, was a succès de scandale which provoked a long debate of extraordinary intensity and scope on the nature and outlook of the Russian intelligentsia. The discussion continued after the 1917 Revolution among intellectuals in exile, and was resumed in Russia with the republication of the volume in the Gorbachev era.

The contributors to Signposts were the philosophers N.A. Berdiaev (1874–1948), S.N. Bulgakov (1871–1944) and S.L. Frank (1877–1950); M.O. Gershenzon (1869–1925), a well-known critic and historian of literature; A.S. Izgoev (pseudonym of A.S. Lande, 1872–1935), a journalist active in the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party; B.A. Kistiakovskii (1868–1920), a specialist in constitutional law; and P.B. Struve (1870–1944), an eminent economist and editor, and a member of the Kadet Party’s Central Committee. They argued that the 1905 Revolution had revealed the despotic potential in the intelligentsia’s traditional materialist faith, and urged it to re-examine its values, which were based on a misunderstanding of human nature and threatened the existence of Russian culture.

The shock caused by the volume owed much to the fact that, unlike most of the intelligentsia’s critics, the authors were not of the political right. The majority were former Marxists who had moved to forms of liberalism based on idealist positions in philosophy. But although many intelligentsia groups were also reassessing their values in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, for political reasons liberals closed ranks with the left in an overwhelming condemnation of Signposts as a betrayal of the cause of freedom. The famous Signposts debate (which was pursued in exile after 1917 as a discussion on the meaning of the Russian Revolution) was not a dialogue, but rather a succession of dogmatic professions of faith by mutually hostile political groups. Western historians have commonly stressed the symposium’s significance as a prophetic indictment of Russian radical messianism from the standpoint of liberal pragmatism. But Signposts was not an ideological unity: as well as its dominant liberal Westernism it contained a strong strand of nationalistic messianism which had affinities with traditions on both the Russian left and the right. In this respect the volume reflects a fundamental tension in Russian thought between dogmatic utopianism and radical humanism.
Russian literary Formalism
Authors: Any Carol
Published: September 2018

Russian literary Formalism, an active movement in Russian literary criticism from about 1915 to 1929, approached the literary work as a self-referential, formed artefact rather than as an expression of reality or experience outside the work. It asked the question, ‘How is the work made?’ rather than ‘What does the work say?’ Its founding assumption, that poetic language differs from the language of ordinary communication, spawned numerous investigations of what the Formalists called ‘literariness’ – the qualities that make a work artistic. This distinction between practical and poetic language also allowed the Formalists to argue that literature was an autonomous branch of human activity, evolving according to its own immanent laws rather than as a consequence or reflection of historical events. Proceeding from this theoretical model, the Formalists viewed literary works as responses to previous literature rather than to the outside world.

In their literary theory and their interpretations of particular literary works, the Formalists were reacting to the predominant tendency of Russian literary criticism to draw direct correspondences between lived experience and the literary work. Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovskii, Boris Tomashevskii, Iurii Tynianov and other Formalists questioned accepted correspondences between life and art, casting doubt upon realist interpretations of Russian authors such as Gogol’ and Tolstoi, and examining the narrative structure of non-Russian works such as Tristram Shandy and O. Henry’s short stories. Their analyses showed how intonation, word order, rhythm and referential meaning interact within a literary work, and they argued that literary works are less a reflection of life than an attempt to refresh conventional perceptions. The influence of Russian literary Formalism is felt in more recent theoretical schools such as semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist criticism and new historicism, in so far as all of these take account of the particular use of language in any literary work.
Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich (1894–1975)
Authors: Bakhurst David
Published: September 2018

One of the most accomplished thinkers in the Soviet Marxist tradition, Asmus wrote extensively in many areas of philosophy, and was widely regarded as the Soviet Union’s principal Kant scholar. Early in his career, he became associated with the influential school of ‘dialecticians’ led by A.M. Deborin and produced a number of significant writings in the history of philosophy. When Deborin and his followers were condemned as ‘Menshevizing idealists’ in 1931, Asmus shifted the principal focus of his work to aesthetics and logic. His 1947 textbook of formal logic subsequently became the principal text for logic instruction in the USSR.

Throughout his long career, Asmus experienced a number of political difficulties. Nevertheless, he avoided imprisonment and published consistently, though he was never permitted to go abroad. His importance in Russian philosophy derives not so much from the significance of his theories, but from his role in preserving philosophical culture in Russia through the Stalin period. He aspired to high standards of scholarship and worked hard to foster the study of logic and the history of philosophy. The breadth of his interests and his excellence as a teacher made him an inspirational figure to the young scholars striving to revive Soviet philosophy in the 1960s.
Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1883–1954)
Authors: Grier Philip T.
Published: September 2018

Educated in law and philosophy in the first years of the twentieth century at Moscow University and several Western European universities, Il’in produced an important two-volume commentary on Hegel’s philosophy (1918), and a number of substantial works in political and legal theory, ethics and religious thought, aesthetics and literary criticism in later years. As a resolute foe of the Bolsheviks before and after the Revolution of 1917, he was exiled by them in 1922, living in Berlin until 1938, and subsequently in Switzerland until his death. Throughout his exile he remained deeply devoted to his Russian homeland, circulating extensive proposals for the eventual reconstruction of the Russian state, Church and society following the collapse of the Soviet regime (see Nashi zadachi (Our Tasks) (1956a)). He developed his own distinctive theory of monarchy as an ideal political form, grounded in a doctrine of natural right, and advocated it as the most appropriate choice for Russia in the best case, though he withheld judgment as to whether it would prove historically possible to implement it in the conditions prevailing after the demise of the Soviet system. His writing also focused to a significant extent upon moral and spiritual discipline and renewal, for societies as well as individuals, as necessary conditions of the well-ordered state and the well-lived life.
Neo-Kantianism, Russian
Authors: Nemeth Thomas
Published: September 2018

A rather amorphous movement, Russian Neo-Kantianism, in the first decades of the twentieth century, found its most visible and enduring representatives in A. Vvedenskii and his student/disciple I. Lapshin, both of St Petersburg University, who together took a distinct stance within the movement as a whole. Both were chiefly concerned with epistemological issues although their respective publications revealed a much wider field of interests. Both maintained an allegiance to the spirit of Kantian philosophy while devoting little attention to the intricacies of the three Kantian Critiques. In addition, at Moscow University G. Chelpanov adhered to the ideality of the Kantian categories although he upheld an ultimate realism. In the social sciences P. Novgorodtsev and B. Kistiakovskii defended positions revealing a significant debt to the Baden School of German Neo-Kantianism, and as such they were deeply involved in methodological investigations. Several others (N. Berdiaev, P. Struve, G. Shpet) within Russia also briefly espoused a Neo-Kantianism after abandoning Marxism and before moving on to a usually more idealistic stance. Still another, younger group a decade later, centred chiefly around the journal Logos, maintained an idiosyncratic, though not fully articulated, amalgam of Kantian and Hegelian doctrines. The Bolshevik Revolution led to a decimation of what remained of the movement within Russia and a dispersal of its members, who became increasingly isolated from current philosophical trends and issues.
Il’enkov, Eval’d Vasil’evich (1924–79)
Authors: Bakhurst David
Published: September 2018

Eval’d Il’enkov advanced a distinctive brand of Hegelian Marxism that was influential in the rejuvenation of Soviet philosophy after Stalin. Il’enkov draws on Hegel and Marx to argue that non-material phenomena can exist as genuine features of objective reality independent of the consciousness and will of individuals. Il’enkov argues that the existence of such phenomena, conceived as objectifications of human social activity, is central to the explanation of the nature and possibility of the human mind. The world becomes a possible object of thought through its ’idealization’ by activity, and children attain mental capacities in the full sense only through the appropriation of the ideal as it exists objectified in ’humanity’s spiritual culture’.

Il’enkov’s defence of the reality of culture represents a critique of positivism and scientism, a critique he pursued in many other writings. A tireless opponent of reductionist theories of mind and ’biological determinist’ theories of human development, he advanced a view of persons as socially constituted beings and stressed socialism’s obligation to create the circumstances in which human beings may develop their almost limitless potential. Like many in the post-Stalin era, his criticism of the Soviet philosophical establishment takes the form of a call for a genuinely orthodox form of Marxism, faithful to the spirit of Marx’s thought.
Trubetskoi, Sergei Nikolaevich (1862–1905)
Authors: Poole Randall A.
Published: September 2018

Prince Sergei N. Trubetskoi came from one of the most enlightened and distinguished noble families in Russia. By 1890 he had emerged as one of the country’s major idealist philosophers. He was close, both personally and intellectually, to the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv, whose ideas he developed in a liberal direction, in contrast to Russian thinkers such as the symbolists who engaged Solov’ëv’s utopian dimension. In broadest terms, he aspired towards a universalistic philosophical theism. ‘Like Solov’ëv, Trubetskoi combined Christianity with Platonism in his philosophy and considered the Logos to be the central idea of Christianity. And like Solov’ëv, Trubetskoi was a convinced Westernizer and liberal’ – so wrote Solov’ëv’s nephew. Inspired by a firm conviction in the absolute value and dignity of the human person, which he believed was created in the ‘image and likeness’ of God, Trubetskoi took an active part in the Russian constitutional reform movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. His conception of an ontological ‘concrete idealism’ had great influence in the development of Russian neo-idealism during this period.
Russian philosophy of history
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

In his classic book The Russian Idea Nikolai Berdiaev pointed out that ‘independent Russian thought was awakened by the problem of the philosophy of history’. It was because educated, Westernized Russians needed an answer to the problem of Russia’s whence and whither: Who are we? Where are we going? What is Russia’s place in universal history?

There were many reasons for this passionate search for the meaning of history. It was a means to define Russia’s national identity. It expressed the deeply felt need for modernization, stemming from increasing awareness of the contrast between Russia’s political power and its social backwardness. And – above all, perhaps – it was a result of the disintegration of Russia’s ecclesiastical culture, serving as a substitute for a religious world-view.

The central place in this secular religion of history was occupied by the notion of progress. It showed a direction, thus answering the ‘cursed question’ of what was to be done; therefore, the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia saw the commitment to progress as the most important constitutive part of its self-definition. But many conceptions of progress could also function as a secular theodicy, or rather historiodicy, explaining and justifying the sufferings of the past and present as a necessary price for the triumph of truth and justice in the future. Even more: in a historically retarded country the idea of inevitable stages of development could serve also as a justification for suffering in the immediate future, providing arguments for the view that present individuals, and entire generations, had to sacrifice themselves for the earthly salvation of their descendants. Hence it is understandable that the idea of inevitable, universal progress found in Russia not only enthusiastic advocates but also powerful critics.
Tkachëv, Pëtr Nikitich (1844–86)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej
Published: September 2018

Pëtr Tkachëv, the leading theorist of the ‘Jacobin’ current within Russian revolutionary populism, was a belated disciple of Gracchus (Francois Noël) Babeuf and a forerunner of Vladimir Lenin. Thus his ideas, although lacking theoretical sophistication, had some historical importance as a link between the primitively egalitarian communism of the extreme wing of the French revolution and the modern totalitarian communism of the Bolshevik revolution.
Askol’dov (Alekseev), Sergei Alekseevich (1870–1945)
Authors: Poole Randall A.
Published: September 2018

A prominent philosopher of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Sergei Askol’dov was Aleksei Kozlov’s son and philosophical disciple. (Askol’dov was a pseudonym; his legal name was Alekseev, i.e., ‘son of Aleksei’, because he was born out of wedlock and could not take his father’s surname.) Continuing the Russian neo-Leibnizian tradition founded by Kozlov, he embraced the doctrine of ‘panpsychism’, holding that reality is a plurality of conscious spiritual substances (monads). At the same time, he developed this metaphysical system much further in the direction of religious philosophy. He was a sharp critic of Kantianism, which he faulted for a misplaced emphasis on ‘consciousness in general’ instead of the proper concern of philosophy – being. He hoped that his own spiritualistic conception of being would facilitate ‘the return to the natural development of Christian philosophy, interrupted by the barbaric age of pseudo-enlightenment’. Retrograde moments aside, Askol’dov was a serious, and at times profound, philosophical and religious thinker.
Mīmāṃsā
Authors: Taber John A.
Published: September 2018

The school of Mīmāṃsā or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā was one of the six systems of classical Hindu philosophy. It grew out of the Indian science of exegesis and was primarily concerned with defending the way of life defined by the ancient scripture of Hinduism, the Veda. Its most important exponents, Śabarasvāmin, Prabhākara and Kumārila, lived in the sixth and seventh centuries ad. It was realist and empiricist in orientation. Its central doctrine was that the Veda is the sole means of knowledge of dharma or righteousness, because it is eternal. All cognition, it held, is valid unless its cause is defective. The Veda being without any fallible author, human or divine, the cognitions to which it gives rise must be true. The Veda must be authorless because there is no recollection of an author or any other evidence of its having been composed; we only observe that it has been handed down from generation to generation. Mīmāṃsā thinkers also defended various metaphysical ideas implied by the Veda – in particular, the reality of the physical world and the immortality of the soul. However, they denied the existence of God as creator of the world and author of scripture. The eternality of the Veda implies the eternality of language in general. Words and the letters that constitute them are eternal and ubiquitous; it is only their particular manifestations, caused by articulations of the vocal organs, that are restricted to certain times and places. The meanings of words, being universals, are eternal as well. Finally, the relation between word and meaning is also eternal. Every word has an inherent capacity to indicate its meaning. Words could not be expressive of certain meanings as a result of artificial conventions.

The basic orientation of Mīmāṃsā was pragmatic and anti-mystical. It believed that happiness and salvation result just from carrying out the prescriptions of the Veda, not from the practice of yoga or insight into the One. It criticized particularly sharply other scriptural traditions (Buddhism and Jainism) that claimed to have originated from omniscient preceptors.
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika
Authors: Franco Eli , Preisendanz Karin
Published: September 2018

The Nyāya school of philosophy developed out of the ancient Indian tradition of debate; its name, often translated as ‘logic’, relates to its original and primary concern with the method (nyāya) of proof. The fully fledged classical school presents its interests in a list of sixteen categories of debate, of which the first two are central: the means of valid cognition (perception, inference, analogy and verbal testimony) and the soteriologically relevant objects of valid cognition (self, body, senses, sense objects, cognition, and so on). The latter reflect an early philosophy of nature added to an original eristic-dialectic tradition. On the whole, classical Nyāya adopts, affirms and further develops, next to its epistemology and logic, the ontology of Vaiśeṣika. The soteriological relevance of the school is grounded in the claim that adequate knowledge of the sixteen categories, aided by contemplation, yogic exercises and philosophical debate, leads to release from rebirth. Vaiśeṣika, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nature most concerned with the comprehensive enumeration and identification of all distinct and irreducible world constituents, aiming to provide a real basis for all cognitive and linguistic acts. This endeavour for distinction (viśeṣa) may well account for the school’s name. Into the atomistic and mechanistic worldview of Vaiśeṣika a soteriology and orthodox ethics are fitted, but not without tensions; still later the notion of a supreme god, whose function is at first mainly regulative but later expanded to the creation of the world, is introduced. In the classical period the Vaiśeṣika philosophy of nature, including the highly developed doctrine of causality, is cast into a rigorous system of six, later seven, categories (substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity, inherence, nonexistence). Nyāya epistemology increasingly influences that of Vaiśeṣika.

The interaction and mutual influences between Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika finally led to the formation of what may be styled a syncretistic school, called Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika in modern scholarly publications. This step, facilitated by the common religious affiliation to Śaivism, occurs with Udayana (eleventh century), who commented on texts of both schools. Subsequently, numerous syncretistic manuals attained high popularity. Udayana also inaugurated the period of Navya-Nyāya, ‘New Logic’, which developed and refined sophisticated methods of philosophical analysis.
Abhinavagupta (c.975–1025)
Authors: Muller-Ortega Paul E.
Published: September 2018

Abhinavagupta was a Kashmiri philosopher, theologian and early exponent of the Hindu Tantra, often counted as the most illustrious representative of the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir. Author of influential Sanskrit works dealing with the philosophy of recognition and the theological interpretation of the Śaivite scriptures, including the encyclopedic Tantrāloka (Light on the Tantras), he also wrote definitively on Indian aesthetic theory. The tradition of the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir gathers up the teachings of several related lineages of northern Śaivite philosophers which developed in Kashmir between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, such as Vasugupta, Kallaṭa, Somānanda and Utpala. Basing his writings on these authors as well as on revealed texts, Abhinavagupta propounds a tantric alternative to the restrictive and orthodox Mīmāṃsā and elaborates a challenge to the later mainline Vedānta. He offers the earliest theoretical bases for a complex and sophisticated Hindu Tantra based on the notion of Śiva as the nondual and all-pervading consciousness. His writings highlight the centrality of the Goddess as the Śakti or power of consciousness. Abhinavagupta elaborates the ritual and meditative methods for the experiential and blissful recognition of Śiva as the intrinsic self-identity of the practitioner.
Buddha (6th–5th century BC)
Authors: Cousins L.S.
Published: September 2018

The title of Buddha is usually given to the historical founder of the Buddhist religion, Siddhārtha Gautama, although it has been applied to other historical figures, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and to many who may be mythological. The religion which he founded was enormously successful and for a long period was probably the most widespread world religion. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much a religion as a kind of philosophy. Indeed, Buddhism bears close comparison with some of the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world in this respect. The Buddha himself does not seem to have known the concept of a transcendent God and most schools of Buddhism have repudiated it on the grounds, among others, that it undermines personal responsibility for action. Buddhism could be considered as a kind of ‘metareligion’, open to many religious practices and tolerating others, but not identifiable with religious activity as such – more a kind of philosophical structuring of religion together with a methodology for self-development. Associated with this latter is an elaborate and sophisticated account of mental states and the functioning of consciousness. Characteristic of earlier Buddhist thought is a positive emphasis upon balanced states and a strong rejection of any form of underlying substance and most types of changelessness.