In the past decade, the philosophical scene in Russia has changed dramatically: it has become much more diverse, lively, and interesting. As a result, it is more difficult, but at the same time more important, to keep abreast of significant developments in Russian philosophy. As a journal of translations, Russian Studies in Philosophy plays a unique role in giving the English-language reader direct access to at least some of the serious philosophical work currently being done in Russia. I endorse the (...) editorial policy set forth by my predecessor, James P. Scanlan, in his first issue . With the help of the new advisory board, I shall try to make the journal reflect, as it has done in the past, the state of Russian philosophy. To achieve this, the journal will cover various branches of philosophy and publish materials from different sources—articles from the long-established as well as new specialized journals, chapters or sections from books, book reviews, roundtable discussions, and conference papers. As the Russian philosophical community becomes increasingly diversified, the journal will try to focus on the most controversial issues and present the conflicting viewpoints in a fair and balanced way. It is particularly important to follow Russia's changing view of itself, its revaluation of the Soviet and pre-Soviet philosophical heritage, and its increasing involvement in the world dialogue of the various philosophical traditions. The current issue of the journal presents a discussion of the importance and merits of one doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. (shrink)

The first selection in this issue is the fullest available biography of G.G. Shpet. Written by his grandson, it is particularly interesting for its attempt to place Shpet in the social and cultural context of his time. There are a number of inaccuracies in it, to which Shpet's daughter by the second marriage, Marina Gustavovich Shtorkh, has drawn attention. Shpet's birthday is March 26, not 25 OS. Shpet's mother did not marry a distant relative; the boy was adopted by her (...) brother, Jan Boleslaw Shpett. She did not welcome her son's second marriage but she accepted it. She registered her son as a Lutheran, rather than a Catholic, because she believed that one's religious faith should be a personal decision and that it would be easier for him later to switch, if he chose to do so, from Lutheranism to Catholicism than vice versa. Shpet's first wife, Mar'ia Aleksandrovna, left the stage by her own decision, not because of his insistence: she thought her acting career was incompatible with raising a family. She was not the sole support of her children and Shpet's mother: he always helped to support them and his mother always worked. She died in September, not in October 1940. In exile Shpet was not always accompanied by a family member and, after his death, at Leonora's and then Marina's apartments. (shrink)

This issue is devoted to recent studies of Kant's philosophy in Russia. Russian Kant studies have a long and distinguished tradition: in the nineteenth century there was a strong Kantian current in Russian philosophy itself and in the Soviet period Kant was studied as the key figure in the development of German thought, which led to Marxism. The impact of German philosophy on Russian thought has been and, I think, continues to be greater than that of any other philosophical tradition. (...) It is not surprising, then, that Russia has produced some outstanding specialists not only on Marx and Hegel but also on Kant. They include such names as V.F. Asmus, A.V. Gulyga, and T.I. Oizerman. Hopefully, this issue will be of interest to Kant specialists in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

This issue consists of a lengthy piece belonging to a genre that is rarely found in philosophical journals and was hardly conceivable in scholarly Soviet journals—an informal exploration of several loosely connected themes the purpose of which is to raise questions and stimulate thinking, rather than to offer answers. The author poses a number of important questions about knowledge and comments on some solutions proposed by other philosophers without attempting to make his survey exhaustive or to reach a definite conclusion. (...) It suffices if his reflections are interesting and provocative. (shrink)

In the past decade, the philosophical scene in Russia has changed dramatically: it has become much more diverse, lively, and interesting. As a result, it is more difficult, but at the same time more important, to keep abreast of significant developments in Russian philosophy. As a journal of translations, Russian Studies in Philosophy plays a unique role in giving the English-language reader direct access to at least some of the serious philosophical work currently being done in Russia. I endorse the (...) editorial policy set forth by my predecessor, James P. Scanlan, in his first issue. With the help of the new advisory board, I shall try to make the journal reflect, as it has done in the past, the state of Russian philosophy. To achieve this, the journal will cover various branches of philosophy and publish materials from different sources—articles from the long-established as well as new specialized journals, chapters or sections from books, book reviews, roundtable discussions, and conference papers. As the Russian philosophical community becomes increasingly diversified, the journal will try to focus on the most controversial issues and present the conflicting viewpoints in a fair and balanced way. It is particularly important to follow Russia's changing view of itself, its revaluation of the Soviet and pre-Soviet philosophical heritage, and its increasing involvement in the world dialogue of the various philosophical traditions. The current issue of the journal presents a discussion of the importance and merits of one doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. (shrink)

In this issue, Russian philosophers look back at the seventy-year Soviet period of their discipline and try to sort out its main achievements, key turning points, and patterns of development. All of them realize that their involvement in the period that they are assessing—they were all recognized Soviet philosophers—and the temporal closeness of the period—only a decade has passed since the period's official ending—makes it impossible for them to offer anything more than subjectively tinted, tentative judgments. But at the same (...) time, they are well situated to fix the telling details, the special atmosphere, and the memorable figures of this period, facts that, otherwise, will become inaccessible to future historians. The strength of the accounts presented here lies in their immediacy, their rootedness in personal experience. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology is a distinctive discipline established in the 1920s-30s by German thinkers. It arose as an attempt to integrate various philosophical methods and theories and to confirm the synthetic conception of man by scientific data from fields such as biology, psychology, ethnology, and sociology. The task was to use the ideas and information about man provided by religious and historical experience, philosophical speculation, and scientific research to develop a general theory of man that would be comprehensive enough to qualify (...) for philosophical status and grounded enough empirically to qualify for scientific status. This ambitious program ran into various difficulties some of which are discussed in the selections in this issue of our journal. (shrink)

Since perestroika, popular interest in the ideas of Pavel Florenskii has declined, but scholarly interest in them has increased steadily. In Russia an authoritative four-volume collection of his works came out in 1994-99 and a fifteen-volume collection has been planned. His largest and most important work, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth [Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny] was reprinted in Moscow in 1990 and was translated into English in 1997. An Italian translation has been available since 1974 and a French (...) one since 1975. A German translation is under way. The first three volumes of a ten-volume German collection of his works have come out. There is a dearth of English translations and studies of Florenskii's work. The only book-length study is R. Slesinski's Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. The most solid and extensive research on Florenskii is done in Germany and it is fully covered by M. Hagemeister's bibliographies, which appear among the papers of two international conferences on Florenskii. The papers of the first conference, which took place in 1988 in Bergamo, were published as PA. Florenskij i kul'tura ego vremeni / P.A. Florenskij e la cultura della sua epoca in 1995 and those of the second conference, which took place in Potsdam in 2000, as Pavel Florenskij—Tradition und Moderne in 2001. Our journal has published a translation of Florenskii's "Avtoreferat " and two articles on him— one on his relation to contemporary Orthodox theology and one on his importance to the future Russian culture. (shrink)

Since perestroika, Russian thinkers have joined the general discussion of the contemporary relevance of Marxism. In the last two decades, this debate has intensified in the West. According to one side, Marxism is intellectually and politically exhausted. It is a prime example of the grand narrative and the Enlightenment project. In practice it has proved to be not merely incapable of raising undeveloped societies out of poverty but immensely destructive: it has served as the ideological underpinning of the most totalitarian (...) regimes the world has ever known. According to the other side, Marxism is an enduring critical tradition that has furnished postmodernism with its key concepts and has helped to transform the primitive capitalism of Marx's time into the postindustrial welfare state of today. To meet the new challenges of globalization, world poverty, environmental degradation, and gender and racial inequality, this side argues, we must make full use of Marxism's critical potential. (shrink)

There is one theme that appears in one way or another in all the selections of this issue—the role of the dialectic in A.F. Losev's early philosophical thought. The first selection—the last three chapters of Losev's The Dialectics of Myth—demonstrates his dialectical phenomenology at work: chapter 12 defines myth by negation, by contrasting it with other related concepts, chapter 13 comes up with synthetic positive definitions, and chapter 14 looks forward to a dialectically constructed philosophical interpretation of the Orthodox faith. (...) V.L. Marchenkov's full translation of Losev's book—the first substantial translation of any of Losev's works into English—will be published by Routledge in 2003. (shrink)

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev is the twentieth-century Russian philosopher best known in the West. Upon his expulsion from Russia in 1922, he lived briefly in Berlin and then in Clamart, at the outskirts of Paris. He was personally acquainted not only with the leading Russian thinkers of his generation such as Lev Shestov, Petr Stuve, and Sergei Bulgakov, but also some important German and French philosophers such as Max Scheler, Gabriel Marcel, and Jacques Maritain. The works he considered to be his (...) most important ones were written in France in the interwar period. He published forty-three books and about 380 articles. Thirty-five of his books were monographs of varying length, the rest were collections of his articles. Twenty-seven of his monographs have been translated into over twenty languages: twenty of them into English. In Russia his first book, a collection of articles, appeared in 1901. After his banishment his works were banned in Russia for almost seventy years. They began to appear only in 1989 and by now twenty of his major works are available to the Russian reader. (shrink)

The five selections in this issue deal with some of the most important and widely known Russian religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. Although this is not pointed out in any of the selections, it is an interesting fact that some of these thinkers were personally acquainted and discussed their ideas with each other. In the last few years of his life Fedor Dostoevsky was friends with young Vladimir Solov'ev and they discussed not only their own ideas but also those (...) of Nikolai Fedorov. Although Fedorov had not published anything on his project of resurrection, both Solov'ev and Lev Tolstoy were well acquainted with his ideas through conversations with him at the Rumiantsev library, where Fedorov served as a librarian. They disagreed on basic issues and their discussions helped to define the differences between them. Some of the differences are mentioned in our selections. (shrink)

This issue is devoted to an area of philosophy that, under the Soviet regime, had been drained of intellectual vitality and is now beginning to show signs of life. The authors of our first two selections are the leading Russian specialists in the field of ethics and the editors of an encyclopedic dictionary of ethics, which, undoubtedly, will have a great impact on the further development of the field.

For fifty years Voprosy filosofii has served as the chief vehicle of philosophical thought in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. During that time it has reflected the changes that occurred in the thinking of the philosophical community and at the same time has contributed to those changes. Its history, then, is an integral part of the development of Russian philosophy after World War II.

Russia lacks a tradition of religious and political tolerance and the topic has been rarely discussed by Russian philosophers. The Philosophical Encyclopedia published in the Soviet period contains no entry on tolerance. It is only in the last few years, in the course of the larger discussion of Russia's place in the world, the distinctive character of its culture and history, and the direction of its future development that some thinkers have begun to raise the question of tolerance. The first (...) two selections in this issue of our journal attempt to analyze the concept of tolerance, while the subsequent selections explore its importance in today's multicultural world and in Russia's history and current predicament. (shrink)

The historical turn in nineteenth-century philosophy, the recognition of the history of philosophy as an integral part of philosophy itself, gave rise to the study of ancient philosophy as a special philosophical discipline. The interest of Russian philosophers in ancient thought is attributable not only to the influence of German idealism but also to their rootedness in Orthodox theological thought, which is Platonic at its core. The earliest systematic studies of the ancient philosophers were written by professors at Kiev University (...) or the Kiev Theological Academy, all of whom were graduates of the academy: M. Novytskyi, P.I. Linytskyi, and S. Gogotskyi. A new educational policy, introduced by the imperial government in the 1880s, provided a strong stimulus to studies of ancient philosophy. The policy placed classical philology at the core of higher education and made ancient philosophy a mandatory subject. The authorities hoped that this reform would sever the link between higher education and political radicalism and divert the attention of students from current social issues. At the turn of the century, studies of ancient philosophy in Russia were enriched not only with translations of well-established names in the field, but also with original contributions from Russian scholars such as A.N. Giliarov, M.I. Karinskii, S.N. Trubetskoi, F. Zelenogorskii, and A.I. Vvedenskii. (shrink)

In the last few decades we have become aware of the ecological problem, a problem of unprecedented scale and urgency. It consists of the danger that within our or the succeeding generation all life on earth, including the human species, will become extinct. This possibility rests on the one hand on the conspicuous changes in the global environment that are being effeted by human activity and, on the other, on a new physical theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. According to this discipline, (...) complex dynamic systems like the earth's biosphere are extremely unstable. When internal or external fluctuations exceed a certain threshold, such systems collapse into a state of chaos, the outcome of which is in principle unpredictable. The new systems that emerge from chaos are more complex, flexible, and efficient in utilizing free energy, but their components and structure cannot be foreseen. By applying this theory to our biosphere we can infer that if the man-caused disturbances in it exceed a certain level, the biosphere will break down and, eventually, a radically different environment will form. Such catastrophes have already occurred in the course of evolution, wiping out chains of interdependent species and restructuring the biosphere. As two of our authors—V. I. Kurashov and V. I. Danilov-Danil'ian—point out, the fact that we cannot determine our biosphere's threshold and predict at what point the biosphere will descend into chaos is no comfort; on the contrary, it makes our situation all the more dangerous. It is clear that we must immediately drastically reduce our impact on the natural environment. How to do so is not at all clear. (shrink)

In breadth and depth the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on Russian intellectual culture at the turn of the nineteenth century has no parallel in any other country and period. Ten years after the first critical article on Nietzsche appeared in a Russian philosophical journal, a nine-volume and a ten-volume collection of his translated works came out. In 1909 a full collection of his works in Russian translation was launched, but only four volumes were published when the project was discontinued in (...) 1912. In the two decades preceding World War I, Nietzsche had become a household name in Russia. (shrink)

Russian philosophers have always been interested in Descartes's thought and the philosophical movements, particularly the phenomeno-logical movement, which grew out of it. Some of them, notably Gustav Shpet and Murab Mamardashvili, were even influenced by and contributed to the development of transcendental phenomenology. Except for N. V. Motroshilova's paper, this issue deals with Descartes and the Cartesian tradition in modern philosophy rather than their influence in Russia. The articles presented here are recent studies by Russian philosophers of Descartes's ideas and (...) their influence in European thought. The last article in this area to appear in our journal was Iu. D. Artamonova's analysis of Descartes's and Aristotle's conceptions of the mind. The familiarity with primary sources and the sophistication of the argumentation in the selections presented here confirm the fact that the history of philosophy was one of the strongest and most interesting branches of Soviet philosophy. (shrink)

The first four selections in this issue are devoted to the question of the future of science in Russia. A. V. Iurevich and I. P. Tsapenko outline the depressed state of Russian science today and the tendencies that, unless checked, will bring about its complete collapse. The precipitous decline in government financing of research has not been offset by support from international foundations or private business in Russia. The salaries of scientists are among the lowest in the economy—below the official (...) subsistence level. In the last ten years the ranks of scientists have been reduced by half: some researchers are unemployed, others have gone into commerce or politics, and others have emigrated. Those who remain in the research institutes are often underemployed, lack up-to-date literature and equipment, and have few opportunities to publish their results. It is not surprising that scientific productivity measured by the number of discoveries and inventions has fallen drastically. The government ignores this situation because the scientific community lacks political influence. The public at large is too preoccupied with economic and political matters to give any thought to science or feel any sympathy for the scientists. The authors predict that if the trends of the last decade continue, Russia will be reduced to a source of raw materials, a country without science, advanced technology, higher education, and intellectual leadership. A strong science policy is urgently needed. (shrink)