bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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.
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.
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.
Buddhism, Mādhyamika: India and Tibet
Authors: Kawamura Leslie S. 
Published: September 2018

Madhyamaka (‘the Middle Doctrine’) Buddhism was one of two Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, the other being Yogācāra, that developed in India between the first and fourth centuries ad. The Mādhyamikas derived the name of their school from the Middle Path (madhyamapratipad) doctrine expounded by the historical Siddhārtha, prince of the Śākya clan, when he gained the status of a buddha, enlightenment. The Madhyamaka, developed by the second-century philosopher Nāgārjuna on the basis of a class of sūtras known as the Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’), can be seen in his foundational Mūlamadhyamakakārikā(Fundamental Central Way Verses). Therein he expounds the central Buddhist doctrines of the Middle Path in terms of interdependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), conventional language (prajñapti), no-self nature (niḥsvabhāva) and voidness (śūnyatā). He grants that the dharma taught by the enlightened ones is dependent upon two realities (dve satye samupāśritya) – the conventional reality of the world (lokasaṃvṛtisatyam) and reality as the ultimate (satyam paramārthataḥ). Although voidness is central to Madhyamaka, we are warned against converting śūnyatā into yet another ‘ism’.
Historically, Madhyamaka in India comprises three periods – the early period (second to fifth century), represented by the activities of Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva and Rāhulabhadra; the middle period (fifth to seventh century) exemplified by Buddhapālita and Bhāvaviveka (founders respectively of the *Prāsaṅgika and *Svātantrika schools of Madhyamaka), and Candrakīrti; and the later period (eighth to eleventh century), which includes Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who fused the ideas found in the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra systems. Many of the Indian Madhyamaka scholars of the later period contributed to Madhyamaka developments in Tibet.
Materialism, Indian school of
Authors: Franco Eli , Preisendanz Karin 
Published: September 2018

‘Materialism’ stands here for the Sanskrit term Lokāyata, the most common designation for the materialistic school of classical Indian philosophy. However, at the outset ‘materialism’ and ‘Lokāyata’ were not equivalent: early materialistic doctrines were not associated with Lokāyata, and early Lokāyata was neither materialistic nor even a philosophical school.
Classical Lokāyata stands apart from all other Indian philosophical traditions due to its denial of ethical and metaphysical doctrines such as karmic retribution, life after death, and liberation. Its ontology, tailored to support this challenge, allows only four material elements and their various combinations. Further support comes from Lokāyata epistemology: the validity of inference and Scriptures is denied and perception is held to be the only means of valid cognition. As offshoots, a fully fledged scepticism and a theory of limited validity of inference developed in response to criticism by other philosophers. Consistent with Lokāyata ontology and epistemology, its ethics centres on the criticism of all religious and moral ideals which presuppose invisible agents and an afterlife. Hostile sources depict its followers as promulgating unrestricted hedonism.
Vedānta
Authors: Phillips Stephen H. 
Published: September 2018

Indian philosophical speculation burgeoned in texts called Upaniṣads (from 800 bc), where views about a true Self (ātman) in relation to Brahman, the supreme reality, the Absolute or God, are propounded and explored. Early Upaniṣads were appended to an even older sacred literature, the Veda (‘Knowledge’), and became literally Vedānta, ‘the Veda’s last portion’. Classical systems of philosophy inspired by Upaniṣadic ideas also came to be known as Vedānta, as well as more recent spiritual thinking. Classical Vedānta is one of the great systems of Indian philosophy, extending almost two thousand years with hundreds of authors and several important subschools. In the modern period, Vedānta in the folk sense of spiritual thought deriving from Upaniṣads is a major cultural phenomenon.
Understood broadly, Vedānta may even be said to be the philosophy of Hinduism, although in the classical period there are other schools (notably Mīmāṃsā) that purport to articulate right views and conduct for what may be called a Hindu community (the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ gained currency only after the Muslim invasion of the South Asian subcontinent, beginning rather late in classical times). Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the great popularizer of Hindu ideas to the West, spoke of Vedānta as an umbrella philosophy of a Divine revealed diversely in the world’s religious traditions. Such inclusivism is an important theme in some classical Vedānta, but there are also virulent disputes about how Brahman should be conceived, in particular Brahman’s relation to the individual.
In the twentieth century, philosophers such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, K.C. Bhattacharyya and T.M.P. Mahadevan have articulated idealist worldviews largely inspired by classical and pre-classical Vedānta. The mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo propounds a theism and evolutionary theory he calls Vedānta, and many others, including political leaders such as Gandhi and spiritual figures as well as academics, have developed or defended Vedāntic views.
Awareness in Indian thought
Authors: Phillips Stephen H. 
Published: September 2018

Classical Indian schools all stake out positions on awareness, its intrinsic nature, its place in the causal processes crucial to human accomplishment, its relations to objects in the world, and the possibilities, according to certain religious or spiritual theories, of mystical transformation. In several prominent instances, stances taken on awareness may be said to constitute the most salient differentiation among schools, so central to a school’s overall outlook is its view on the topic. Classical epistemological conceptions, for example, are in large part shaped by positions on awareness, and the spiritual philosophies for which Indian thought is best known present theories of awareness to guide meditation and mystical practice. Yogic, Vedāntic and Buddhist mysticism all came to be supported by views of the true nature of awareness or its native state.
In the professionalized debates that fill the immense proliferation of philosophical texts in the classical period (from approximately ad 100 to the eighteenth century and later), key issues are whether awarenesses have forms of their own or assume content only with reference to objects, and the precise nature of the relation, or relations, of awarenesses to objects in the world, including the role of awareness in human activity. Some important positions are shared across schools, and apart from the anti-theoretic polemics of Mādhyamaka Buddhists and others, a phenomenalist and idealist stance, a representationalism, and a direct or causal realism are the major theories concerning the content of awarenesses.
The world-oriented philosophies of Logic (Nyāya) and Exegesis (Mīmāṃsā) engage spiritual or mystical views (principally, Buddhist Yogācāra and Advaita Vedānta) on the issue of self-awareness or awareness of awareness. The exchange between upholders of Nyāya and Advaita Vedānta (Vedāntic Monism) on this score is, in particular, an admirable philosophical achievement.
Error and illusion, Indian conceptions of
Authors: Phillips Stephen H. 
Published: September 2018

From the earliest Indian speculation, illusion has been key in the exposition of Indian mysticism. In classical philosophy proper, all schools take positions concerning illusion (sometimes called error) early in their histories, and in some schools successive refinements are achieved over the centuries.
There is a wealth of reflection on illusion from different angles – for example, psychological treatments that differentiate seven, eight or ten types of illusion, identifying causal factors for each variety. Illusion is taken to have ontological and epistemological ramifications brought out in elaborations of one or another metaphysical system.
The sections of classical philosophical texts devoted specifically to illusion generally presuppose or smuggle in criteria of veridical awareness in the midst of causal analyses or systematic explanations of such stock examples as a snake appearing as a rope, a piece of shell appearing as silver, two moons, a ‘red’ crystal with a red flower behind it, a mirage, the ‘blue’ of the sky, and dreams. Arguments in support of a criterion, or set of criteria, of veridicality do appear, however. How we understand (1) what counts as a veridical and a nonveridical experience and (2) why individual cases of illusion occur are distinct issues, but positions taken on the former determine important parts of conceptions about why illusions occur. A peculiar stylistic feature of the later and more refined philosophic treatments is a polemical ordering, where a first view’s inadequacy is shown to lead to a second view whose inadequacy, demonstrated in turn, leads on to a better theory, and so on, until we reach the right view, which is thus established by a sequence of arguments.
Inference, Indian theories of
Authors: Gillon Brendan S. 
Published: September 2018

The use of argument in rational inquiry in India reaches almost as far back in time as its oldest extant literature. Even in very early texts, one finds the deliberate use of modus tollens, for example, to refute positions thought to be false. In light of such practice, it is not surprising to discover that Indian thinkers came to identify certain forms of reasoning and to study them systematically.
The study of inference in India is, as Karl Potter (1977) has emphasized, not the study of valid reasoning as reflected in linguistic or paralinguistic forms, but the study of the circumstances in which knowledge of some facts permits knowledge of another fact, and of when acceptance by one person of some state of affairs as a fact requires that that person accept another as a fact. Still, the form of inference which came to be systematically investigated in India can be given schematically (see below).
At the core of the study of inference in India is the use of a naïve realist ontology. The world consists of individual substances or things (dravya), universals (sāmānya), and relations between them. The fundamental relation is the one of occurrence (vṛtti). The relata of this relation are known as substratum (dharmin) and superstratum (dharma) respectively. The relation has two forms: contact (saṃyoga) and inherence (samavāya). So, for example, one individual substance, say a pot, may occur on another, say the ground, by the relation of contact. In this case, the pot is the superstratum and the ground is the substratum. Or a universal, say brownness, may occur in an individual substance, say a pot, by the relation of inherence. Here, brownness, the superstratum, inheres in the pot, the substratum. The converse of the relation of occurrence is the relation of possession.
Another important relation is the relation that one superstratum bears to another. This relation, known as pervasion (vyāpti), can be defined in terms of the occurrence relation. One superstratum pervades another just in case wherever the second occurs the first occurs. The converse of the pervasion relation is the concomitance relation. As a result of these relations, the world embodies a structure: if one superstratum H is concomitant with another superstratum S, and if a particular substratum p possesses the former superstratum, then it possesses the second. This structure is captured in this inferential schema: Pakṣa (thesis): p has S.Hetu (ground): p has H.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has H has S.
Here are two paradigmatic cases of such an inference: Pakṣa (thesis): p has fire.Hetu (ground): p has smoke.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has smoke has fire. Pakṣa (thesis): p is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).Hetu (ground): p is an oak (that is, has oak-ness).Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever is an oak (that is, has oak-ness) is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).