bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Intentionality, phenomenological perspectives
Authors: Drummond John 
Published: September 2018

Intentionality – the directedness of mental experiences to an object – is one of the main themes of phenomenology. Franz Brentano revived the medieval doctrine of intentionality, but it was Edmund Husserl who pioneered the phenomenological approach to intentionality and provided a detailed account of its structure. Husserl employed a phenomenological methodology that is descriptive, that aims at revealing the essential structures of intentional experience and that considers without presuppositions drawn from other quarters both the experience and its object just as they are experienced. Phenomenological investigations of intentionality explore, in other words, both the experience’s directedness to its object and the object’s being given in a particular manner or under a particular conception. In part to distinguish his view from psychological views, Husserl adopts a technical vocabulary in his discussions. He refers to the complex of mental performances and syntheses that account for the experience’s directedness as the ‘noesis’, and he refers to the object just as experienced as the ‘noema’. Thus, for Husserl, the study of intentionality is the analysis of the noesis-noema correlation.
This formula should not mislead: the intentional correlation is not a simple, one-noesis-to-one-noema correlation. Reflection reveals immediately that the experience of an object is temporally extended and that a single object is experienced in a multiplicity of appearances, from many perspectives and under many different aspects or conceptions. This requires that phenomenology examine the temporal structure of both the experience and the experienced object. Moreover, phenomenology must examine the role of the body in generating multiple appearances of an object from different spatial perspectives as well as how differences in embodiment affect our understanding of objects. Finally, since something is an object only to the extent that it is experienced by a multiplicity of persons, phenomenology must also examine intersubjectivity to determine how it is that an object is the same for all of us and how history – our shared temporality – contributes to the understanding of our shared world. All these issues flow from the reflection on the intentionality of experience and were considered by Husserl and his successors.
Lifeworld and science
Authors: Dodd James 
Published: September 2018

In phenomenology, ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) denotes the immediate, everyday, concrete whole of the subjectively experienced world. Its original elaboration in the thought of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) played a central role in his attempt to ground the rationality of the sciences in the active and passive syntheses of subjective life.
Husserl's concept of lifeworld was originally influenced by the work of Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and progressively deepened throughout his philosophical career until it reached its most sophisticated form in the 1930s. Though relevant to a wide variety of analyses of ethical life, perceptual experience and the problem of history, the lifeworld plays its perhaps most important role in Husserl's phenomenological interpretation of scientific rationality. The lifeworld plays a critical role in Husserl’s mature conception of science in two fundamental respects: first, the lifeworld provides the framework for Husserl’s investigation of the origin of basic concepts of logical reasoning (such as negation and states of affairs) in lived experience; second, it anchors his account of rational evidence and truth in the prediscursive dimensions of lived experience. The concept of the lifeworld has proven to be one of Husserl's most important philosophical contributions and has been subsequently developed in a number of post-Husserlian strands of phenomenology and sociology.
Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)
Authors: Maskit Jonathan 
Published: September 2018

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, raised in Reims, and spent much of his adult life in Paris. Never formally trained as a philosopher, he worked from 1922 to 1942 as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. In addition to his philosophical works, Bataille also wrote on the history of art as well as a number of critical works and novels.
Owing to his position outside academic philosophy, Bataille was able to treat diverse topics in ways which might have been unacceptable otherwise. His work addresses the importance of sacrifice, eroticism and death, as well as the kinds of ‘expenditure’ evidenced by what he called the general economy. It draws on diverse sources (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, anthropological research, and the history of religion, among others) and treats a wide range of topics: the role of art in human life, the practice of sacrifice in ancient and modern cultures, the role of death in our understanding of subjectivity, and the limits of knowledge.
Cixous, Hélène (1937–)
Authors: Conley Verena Andermatt 
Published: September 2018

Hélène Cixous, a prolific French author born in Algeria, works between poetry and philosophy. She is part of a larger intellectual community in France that, since the 1960s, has sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical’ notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor.
Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Cixous privileges the artistic and poetic but all her work has philosophical underpinnings, especially those proposed by Derrida. Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, multiplicity and life over identity, univocity and death. She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death. Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Hegel and Heidegger.
Cixous, Hélène (1937–)
Authors: Conley Verena Andermatt 
Published: September 2018

Hélène Cixous, a prolific, internationally acclaimed French writer born in Algeria and now residing in Paris, works between poetry and continental philosophy. She belongs to a larger community of artists and intellectuals in France that, in the 1960s, actively sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical’ notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor.
Influenced by writers and thinkers from many times and places, Cixous privileges art and poetry in work of strong philosophical inflection, especially where it engages with that of Jacques Derrida. Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, and metamorphosis rather than opposition and identity. She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (generally male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death. Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Freud, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche.
Postmodernism, French critics of
Authors: Lilly Reginald 
Published: September 2018

French anti-postmodernism emerged with the generation of philosophers that came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and counts among its ranks some of the most visible and prolific young scholars in France. Unlike schools of thought such as phenomenology, existentialism or Marxism, French anti-postmodernism has no founding figure, central text or core doctrine; anti-postmodernism (a term seldom, if ever, used by the French) therefore is less a philosophical school than a characterization for a diverse group of thinkers who react against those trends that have dominated French intellectual life since the Second World War, especially Marxism, structuralism, existentialism and deconstruction. These trends, grouped together under the heading of ‘postmodernism’, are seen by anti-postmodernists as the last episodes in a failed intellectual adventure whose origins go back at least to the French Revolution.
Critical of nineteenth-century philosophy as having produced, on the one hand, totalizing, speculative philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, and, on the other hand, the anti-rationalism of Nietzsche and his postmodern scions, anti-postmodernists (or neo-moderns as the French prefer to say) represent a return to the concept of the individual and of history as the product of free human agency. Reaffirming the efficacy of public, rational discourse, they tend to be interested in political philosophy, taking democracy and its ideals as a model for raising and addressing philosophical issues. Pluralist in their outlook, they value the disciplinary structure of scholarly work; fields such as epistemology, theology, philosophy of science and the history of ideas which were neglected or marginalized by much postmodern thought have enjoyed renewed prestige and interest among the anti-postmodernists.
Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich (1794–1856)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia’s whence and whither: that is to say, the meaning of Russian history, the character of Russian national identity, and the possible, or necessary, paths of Russian historical development in the future. However, Chaadaev’s answer to these questions was mostly negative: he defined Russia not by what it was, but by what it was not.
A paradoxical feature of Chaadaev’s s position was that his general philosophical views did not apply to his native country. He was a convinced Westernizer, identifying Western development with universal human history, but Russia was in his view the opposite of the West, an exception to the general rules. His general social philosophy, deeply influenced by the French theocratic traditionalists, was inherently conservative, stressing the importance of supra-individual unity and of continuous historical traditions; in contrast with this, his philosophy of Russian history defined Russia as a country without unity and without history, thus lacking the basic conditions for a genuine conservatism. This view provoked a strong reaction among Russian Romantic conservatives: they accepted some aspects of Chaadaev’s conservative critique of atomistic individualism but tried to refute his pessimistic view of Russia, by arguing that, in fact, not Russia but the West represented atomistic disintegration and incapacity for organic development.
Lavrov, Pëtr Lavrovich (1823–1900)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

Pëtr Lavrov was one of the main theorists of Russian populism (narodnichestvo) – a trend of thought and a movement which crystallized after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861.
There were many different currents within this broad trend but all of them concentrated on the possibility and desirability of securing a non-capitalist way of development for Russia. This was so because the populists, having perceived (often with the help of Marx’s Capital) the contradictions of capitalist development, lost their confidence in ‘European’ progress, recognized in capitalism only a regression and chose therefore an adamantly anti-capitalist stand, combined, as a rule, with backward-looking idealization of the peasant commune.
The dominant Western theories of social evolution – from Spencerian liberalism to Marxism – strongly emphasized the ‘objective’ character of the laws of social development and defined capitalism as a necessary phase of progress. Russian populist socialists deeply felt that in Russia’s backward condition such theories offered a convenient tool for apologists of capitalist progress, who sanctioned and justified the suffering of the masses by referring to the ’objective laws of history’ or ‘the iron laws of political economy’. This led them to a demonstrative rejection of the ’objectivist’ conception of progress. Lavrov was the first populist theorist who set against ’objectivism’ a conscious and systematic vindication of ’subjectivism’. He was supported in this by another populist thinker, Nikolai Mikhailovskii. The common features of their views have been labelled ’subjective sociology’ or the ’subjective method’.
Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1842–1904)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

Along with Lavrov, N.K. Mikhailovskii, a non-academic social theorist and literary critic, was the most representative and influential thinker of Russian populism. His most distinctive contribution to populist ideology was his attempt to reconcile the ’principle of individuality’, so dear to the Russian intelligentsia, with the old, communal ’principles of the people’, represented by the non-Westernized Russian peasantry. Unlike Herzen and Lavrov, Mikhailovskii did not see the principle of individuality as a product of Western progress, that is to say, as something which should be introduced from outside to the archaic world of Russian village commune. He challenged the stereotype which associated individualism with the capitalist West; instead, he tried to prove that the principle of individuality was in fact fully compatible with old Russian communalism, and incompatible with Western-type modernization. He did so by a radical redefinition of the very concept of individuality. For him individuality was not the product of a process of ’individualization’ in the sense of loosening the communal bonds, making people socially differentiated, functionally specialized and separated from each other. On the contrary, by individuality he meant the ’inner wholeness’, that is to say, the non-alienated, many-sided and harmonious development of human beings. Following the romantic critics of modernity, he claimed that individuality, so conceived, was being destroyed by capitalist progress.
Mikhailovskii’s notion of individuality was similar to the Slavophile ideal of ’integral personality’. Unlike Slavophilism, however, Mikhailovskii’s ‘sociological romanticism’ was bound up with a secularist worldview and a semi-positivist position in philosophy. For this reason its affinity with Slavophile romantic anticapitalism was relatively inconsequential and remained unnoticed.
Rozanov, Vasilii Vasil’evich (1856–1919)
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer 
Published: September 2018

Vasilii Rozanov, a prominent spokesman of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, is known for his writings on sex, marriage and the family, his attacks on Christian asceticism, and his love–hate attitude to Judaism. He termed Judaism a religion of life because it sanctified sex and the family, and Christianity a religion of death because it exalted celibacy. But Rozanov also charged that Judaism mandated ritual murder and that Jews were feeding off Russians. In Apokalypsis nashego vremeni (The Apocalypse of Our Time) (1917–18), he apologized for his anti-Semitic pronouncements and blamed the Bolshevik Revolution on Christian otherworldliness and sexlessness. In private life, Rozanov was a pillar of the Church, which he regarded as a haven of beauty, warmth, and spiritual succour.
Rozanov’s writings contain brilliant insights, contradictions, distortions and outright lies. ‘Falsehood never tormented me’, he wrote, ‘and for a strange reason. What business is it of yours precisely what I think?’ He championed conservative policies in articles published under his own name and radical policies under a pseudonym. It is clear, however, that Rozanov was deeply religious and that he associated sex and the family with God. ’Dirty diapers and a naked wife: this is the truth of Bethlehem around you.’
Rozanov’s interpretations of Dostoevskii, Gogol’ and other Russian authors were original and perceptive. His collections of aphorisms Solitaria (1912) and Opavshie list’ia (Fallen Leaves, 2 vols) (1913b, 1915), are considered masterpieces of Russian style.
Solov’ëv, Vladimir Sergeevich (1853–1900)
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

It has been widely acknowledged that Vladimir Solov’ëv is the greatest Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century; his significance for Russian philosophy is often compared to the significance of Aleksandr Pushkin for Russian poetry. His first works marked the beginning of the revolt against positivism in Russian thought, followed by a revival of metaphysical idealism and culminating in the so-called Religious-Philosophical Renaissance of the early twentieth century.
Unlike the Russian idealists of the Romantic epoch, Solov’ëv was a professional, systematic philosopher. He created the first all-round philosophical system in Russia and thus inaugurated the transition to the construction of systems in Russian philosophical thought. At the same time he remained faithful to the Russian intellectual tradition of reluctance to engage in purely theoretical problems; his ideal of ‘integrality’ postulated that theoretical philosophy be organically linked to religion and social practice. He saw himself not as an academic philosopher, but rather as a prophet, discovering the way to universal regeneration.
One of the main themes of Solov’ëv’s philosophy of history was Russia’s mission in universal history. Owing to this he was interested in the ideas of the Slavophiles and, in the first period of his intellectual evolution, established close relations with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavic circle of Ivan Aksakov. He was close also to Dostoevskii, on whom he made a very deep impression. At the beginning of the 1880s he began to dissociate himself from the epigones of Slavophilism; his final break with them came in 1883, when he became a contributor to the liberal and Westernizing Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger). The main reason for this was the pro-Catholic tendency of his thought, which led him to believe that Russia had to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. In his view, this was a necessary condition of fulfilling Russia’s universal mission, defined as the unification of the Christian Churches and the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of God on earth.
In the early 1890s Solov’ëv abandoned this utopian vision and concentrated on working out an autonomous ethic and a liberal philosophy of law. This reflected his optimistic faith in liberal progress and his confidence that even the secularization of ethics was essentially a part of the divine–human process of salvation. In the last year of his life, however, historiosophical optimism gave way to a pessimistic apocalypticism, as expressed in his philosophical dialogue Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (1900), and especially the ’Tale of the Antichrist’ appended to it.
Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910)
Authors: Morson Gary Saul 
Published: September 2018

Tolstoi expressed philosophical ideas in his novels Voina i mir (War and Peace) (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–7), which are often regarded as the summit of realism, as well as in shorter fictional works, such as Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (The Death of Ivan Il’ich) (1886), often praised as the finest novella in European literature. In addition, he wrote numerous essays and tracts on religious, moral, social, educational and aesthetic topics, most notably ‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’ (’What Is Art?’) (1898), Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God Is Within You) (1893) and his autobiographical meditation ’Ispoved’’ (A Confession) (1884).
Tolstoi apparently used his essays, letters and diaries to explore ideas by stating them in their most extreme form, while his fiction developed them with much greater subtlety. Critics have discerned a sharp break in his work: an earlier period, in which he produced the two great novels, is dominated by deep scepticism; and a later period following the existential trauma and subsequent conversion experience described in ’Ispoved’’. Tolstoi stressed the radical contingency of events, valued practical over theoretical reasoning, and satirized any and all overarching systems. After 1880, he assumed the role of a prophet, claiming to have found the true meaning of Christianity. He ‘edited’ the Gospels by keeping only those passages containing the essence of Christ’s teaching and dismissed the rest as so many layers of falsification imposed by ecclesiastics. Tolstoi preached pacifism, anarchism, vegetarianism, passive resistance to evil (a doctrine that influenced Gandhi), a radical asceticism that would have banned sex even within marriage, and a theory of art that rejected most classic authors, including the plays of Shakespeare and Tolstoi’s own earlier novels.
Hegelianism, Russian
Authors: Walicki Andrzej 
Published: September 2018

In Russian intellectual history the so-called ‘remarkable decade’ of 1838–48 (P.V. Annenkov’s expression) could be characterized as a truly ‘philosophical epoch’. Speculative philosophy was seen by then as directly relevant to all important questions of national existence. A similar situation obtained then, in exactly the same years, in the lands of partitioned Poland. In both countries all philosophical discussions revolved around Hegel, whose system was perceived as the culminating point in the development of Western philosophy. In Russia the fascination with Hegelianism was widespread and profound, reaching distant provincial centres and leaving its mark on literature. ‘Philosophical notions’, wrote Ivan Kireevskii in 1845, ’have become quite commonplace here now. There is scarcely a person who does not use philosophical terminology, nor any young man who is not steeped in reflections on Hegel’. Herzen provides an identical testimony. Hegel’s works, he wrote,
were discussed incessantly; there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetics, the Encyclopaedia and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit’, or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on the ’absolute personality and its existence in itself’.
(Herzen [1853] 1968: 398)
This vivid reception of Hegelianism was a socially important phenomenon, meeting several deep-seated psychological demands of the young Russian intelligentsia. First, as in Germany, speculative idealism provided the intelligentsia with a sort of compensation for the paralysis of public life under authoritarian government. Second, Hegelian philosophy was welcomed as an antidote to introspective day-dreaming and attitudes of Romantic revolt; in this context Hegelianism was largely interpreted as a philosophy of ’reconciliation with reality’. Somewhat later this conservative interpretation of Hegelianism was replaced by a Left-Hegelian philosophy of rational and conscious action; at this stage Hegelianism came to be a powerful instrument in the struggle against Slavophile conservative Romanticism. Both as a philosophy of reconciliation and as a philosophy of action Russian Hegelianism was above all a philosophy of reintegration; a philosophy which helped young intellectuals in overcoming their feeling of alienation and in building bridges between their ideals and reality.