Abstract

The article for the first time presents the powerful historical and philosophical potential of the collection of handwritten candidate works of Kyiv Theological Academy (КТА) students, which is kept at Manuscript Institute, V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine. According to the analyzed manuscripts, despite the church-confessional and specialized theological orientation of the theological academies, as well as the system of rigid regulations and control by the Most Holy Synod in the subject matters and content of the final works, the students showed a persistent research interest in philosophy. The author identifies more than 150 candidate works of KTA students that are directly relevant to philosophical topics and issues. Most of them are research on the history of Western (from Classical antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century), Eastern and Russian philosophy. At the same time, the handwritten works available in the collection express the interest of students in the problems of epistemology, philosophy of history, social philosophy, axiology, ethics and aesthetics, philosophy of religion, as well as their attraction to complex interdisciplinary studies, combining the issues of philosophy and history of philosophy with theology, psychology, pedagogy and literary studies.