It is not by chance that the title of this article paraphrases Gustav Gustavovich Shpet’s article “The Skeptic and His Soul”. Is Stavrogin a skeptic? Yes, and the novel Demons is a narrative...

The archive of Gustav Shpet contains scattered preparatory materials for his “Lectures on the Theory of Cognition” and his major philosophical work History as a Problem of Logic. Some of these handwritten rough notes are devoted to Kant, indeed some of them have already seen the light of day in the “Kant­ian Journal” (2022, № 3). The notes published below continue to acquaint the reader with Shpet’s creative laboratory. His method of work with the concepts and ideas is instructive in (...) that it enables us to raise questions about the meaning of “positive critique”, its difference from Kant’s own “critical method” and why contemporary historical-philosophical attempts to actualise Kant’s concept of critique have more to do with Shpet’s rather than Kant’s methodology. Of particular relevance today is the authors’ attempt to immerse the Kantian understanding of critique in the context of Shpet’s phenomenologically oriented hermeneutic methodology. (shrink)