bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Taylor, Charles (1931–)
Authors: Calhoun Craig 
Published: September 2018

Among the most influential of late twentieth-century philosophers, Taylor has written on human agency, identity and the self; language; the limits of epistemology; interpretation and explanation in social science; ethics; and democratic politics. His work is distinctive because of his innovative treatments of long-standing philosophical problems, especially those deriving from applications of Enlightenment epistemology to theories of language, the self and political action, and his unusually thorough integration of ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical concerns and approaches.
Taylor’s work is shaped by the view that adequate understanding of philosophical arguments requires an appreciation of their origins, changing contexts and transformed meanings. Thus it often takes the form of historical reconstructions that seek to identify the paths by which particular theories and languages of understanding or evaluation have been developed. This reflects both Taylor’s sustained engagement with Hegel’s philosophy and his resistance to epistemological dichotomies such as ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in favour of a notion of ‘epistemic gain’ influenced by H.G. Gadamer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.