In this article dedicated to Lev P. Karsavin’s creative path, I focus mainly on the evolution of the thinker’s religious–philosophical ideas. I consider the reasons that prompted the professional historian to choose the path of a free philosopher, defending an argument about the interrelation of Karsavin’s historiosophical ideas and the key provisions of his metaphysics. The article assesses the philosopher’s legacy in the context of the problem of Russian religious metaphysics as an independent and significant intellectual tradition that (...) has shaped Russian cultural history among other spiritual–intellectual practices. In denoting the perspective of Karsavin’s activity, the author suggests key tasks in studying the philosopher’s work. These include, on the one hand, revising the corpus of Karsavin studies, and on the other hand, polemicizing with already existing interpretations of his work in Karsavin studies both in Russia and abroad. This strategy allows the author to conduct reinterpretations of Karsavin’s personological, onto-epistemological, and cultural–historical understandings that constitute the theoretical core of his religious metaphysics. (shrink)

This article attempts to analyze Karsavin’s theory of revolution in the broader context of a Russian metaphysics of revolution in order to determine the place of Karsavin’s phenomenology of revolution both in his work and within Eurasianist ideology. His article “Phenomenology of Revolution” ontologically links two key concepts within Karsavin’s understanding: the “symphonic person” and the “ruling stratum.” The meaning of revolution consists in leading the symphonic person to a realization of its main tasks, which require the (...) utmost exertion and are related to the very existence of its historical form. This crisis can result in the person’s death, but in the death of the old person is born a new individuation of a higher order of personhood for whom that revolution has been a rebirth. If the symphonic person succeeds in “being revived through death or recovery,” then this will also be the birth of a new ruling stratum and a new government, that is, its new being as a state. Karsavin thus clarifies the historical functions both of the symphonic person and of the ruling stratum. The latter turns out to be a kind of entelechy of the symphonic person, providing its own personal content to the generic concept. The concept of the ruling stratum is explained in the metaphysical context of the symphonic-person theory. In light of the symphonic person’s mission, the ruling stratum is an organic connection among individuals of the active sociocultural segment of the population that has resonated with the spirit of history and the people. In this case, the stratum “rules” along with parties and institutions, eventually passing judgment on them. The main results of Karsavin’s work are (1) modeling a developmental phase of revolution and (2) the concept of the ruling stratum, which allows us to avoid formal sociological understanding of the active elite and direct our attention to the connection between personal activity and the “silent” but by no means “sleeping” substrate of the nation that manifests itself in critical epochs. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of Lev P. Karsavin, the connection between the philosopher’s historical perspective and his ontological constructions, his postulation of the personhood principle of being’s organization, and the common mindsets of the philosophy of all-unity. The author of this article distinguishes between reflections on the future found in Karsavin’s pre-emigration work and the image of the future he creates within the framework of the Eurasianist paradigm. This article presents three variants of representation of the future: (...) the universal, the national-cultural, and the state. The author analyzes the image of the future associated with the coming-to-be of the All-One Humanity, its transformation into a truly symphonic person, and show how this image turns into a concept of the future that affirms the self-development of national culture. The prospect of developing Russia-Eurasia as an ideocratic and statist state that acts as a form of manifestation of the national culture represents the final stage of this evolution. (shrink)

This article looks at Lev P. Karsavin’s experience with the heritage of early Christian Gnosticism, from his attempts at stylization based on his study of genuine Gnostic texts and his systematic presentation of Gnostic systems in art almanacs published in the Soviet Union, to his perception of Gnosticism as a kind of “other principle” in his original religious–philosophical texts. We show that, following Silver-Age traditions, Karsavin uses myth as a form of philosophical thinking. He teeters on the edge (...) of Gnosticism, applying certain Gnostic concepts, but he generally turns to Gnostic thought only to distinguish it from his own, which he presents as authentic to the Christian tradition. He criticizes both ontological and anthropological postulates of Gnosticism: the hierarchization of intradivine life, the introduction of the cosmic feminine into the bosom of the Divine, the interpretation of the Fall as the kenosis of God in time, and the explanation of the perfect God from the imperfect world, as well as the type of religious personhood that leads to a rupture in theory and personal faith. We examine Karsavin’s reception of Gnosticism against the background of interest in Gnosticism in post-revolutionary Russia, as expressed by Kropotkinite anarchists, A. Karelin, V. Murav’ev, Yu. Danzas, and M. Kuzmin. (shrink)

This article examines the unique role of Russian intellectual and émigré Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952) in understanding “Russian communism” as a phenomenon deeply religious in nature. Trained as a historian, specializing in the history of European religiosity, medieval sects, and heresies, the young Karsavin studied the manifold ways in which religious and politics were interwoven. His experience with concrete historical–cultural research helped Karsavin, who became an active figure in Russian Orthodoxy during the First World War, to analyze (...) the origins of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. Finding himself in exile in 1922, Karsavin continued actively developing the theme of the “religious” nature of Russian Bolshevism, believing that this was the only path to overcoming it in the future from an Orthodox Christian standpoint. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of the perfect, a key idea in Lev P. Karsavin’s metaphysics that largely determines his understanding of personhood and its ontological status. The associated concept of the perfect person develops throughout the entire philosophical period of the thinker’s work, from his Philosophy of History to his treatise “On Perfection,” written in the last year of his life in the Abez’ camps. In this article, I argue that the concept of perfection is the main structural (...) element in Karsavin’s religious–philosophical system, making it ontologically full and complete. I believe the Christian idea of the perfection of man in God, philosophical variations of which Karsavin finds in Nicholas of Cusa’s system of total unity and Vladimir Solovyov’s idea of Godmanhood, is both the initial intellectual intuition and the ontological premise of the thinker’s metaphysical constructions. His religious–philosophical work has a continuity with Russian culture’s spiritual tradition, where patristic thought of man considers the ideal to be the spiritual transcendence of the person in his striving toward the Perfect God. This evangelic idea turns out to be the central binding element both of Karsavin’s Christian personology and of his metaphysics of history, which is resolved in a metaphysical vein. (shrink)

This article discusses development of the content of the concept “Philosophy Steamer,” which refers to the 1922 expulsion from Russia of a group of intelligentsia who sharply criticized the authorities. The author shows that the group of exiled philosophers was united both by their previous philosophical and social activity and by their joint activity as émigrés. She analyzes the concepts of “historical collective individuality,” “collective person,” and “communal person” introduced by Lev P. Karsavin in order to determine the holistic (...) nature of this exiled social group and its characteristic self-consciousness, behavior, aspirations, and feelings (moods). Examining the event known as the “Philosophy Steamer” through the concepts listed above allows the author to cognize the historical, social, and cultural reality more broadly and productively. The article demonstrates that the concept of a collective person can also be applied to other social groups, thereby extending the methodology of human-studies cognition beyond the study of facts and statistical data. (shrink)

We criticize the synaptic theory of long-term memory and the inappropriate usage of physical notions such as in motor control theories. Motor control and motor memory hypotheses should be based on explicitly specified hypothetical control variables that are sound from both physiological and physical perspectives. [HOUK et al.; SMITH; THACH].

The problem of neural memory storage is discussed, based on the results of studies of memory impairment after hippocampal lesions, motor learning, and electrophysiological research on “spinal memory. ” I support Shors & Matzel's major statements. The absence of reliable evidence on the LTP memory storage function and other data cast doubt on the synaptic theory of memory.

Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956). Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon that (...) cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophy. Sesemann's thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about dynamics and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger. The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin. (shrink)

---- t. 6. O nachalakh : opyt khristīanskoĭ metafiziki. [no.] 1. Bog i tvarnyi mīr. [no.] 2-3. Bog i mīr, v Bogochelovi︠e︡ki︠e︡ vi︠e︡chnyĭ ad pobi︠e︡zhdai︠u︡shchīĭ.

1. Bog i tvarnyi mīr -- 2-3. Bog i mīr, v Bogochelovi︠e︡ki︠e︡ vi︠e︡chnyĭ ad pobi︠e︡zhdai︠u︡shchīĭ.

The late 1980s and early 1990s opened up Russian philosophy to the reader at large. The works of N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, LA. Il'in, L.P. Karsavin, N.O. Losskii, V.V. Rozanov, G.P. Fedotov, P.A. Florenskii, S.L. Frank, and Lev Shestov are now published and republished in runs of many thousands. This is a wonderful circumstance, and one can only welcome it. Despite forced emigration and severance from its national roots, Russian philosophy at the beginning of the century held its ground (...) in the intellectual quests and disputes of the twentieth century. A vivid and instructive "Russian imprint" is obvious in existentialism, in structuralism, and in philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Translation of Lev Shestov's What is Philosophy?

In the article, through the prism of the existential philosophy of S. Kierkegaard, K. Jaspers, G.-G. Gadamer and J.-P. Sartre, as well as the theory of ideology of K. Manheim, the personality of the main character of M. Y. Lermontov's drama "Masquerade" – Arbenin is analyzed. The author of the article claims that Arbenin is in a state of existential despair and finds himself in a borderline situation. At the same time, in the drama "Masquerade", the ideals of Romanticism are (...) reduced to a post-Romantic ideology. Lermontov does this intentionally in order to condemn the ideological perversion of the ideals of romantic culture. The drama also focuses on the general cultural border situation: how to protect yourself from the temptations of ideology at a time when existing ideals and values are disappearing. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that in "Masquerade" Lermontov praises the romantic ideals of rebellious spirit and will, transcendent love and insight, even when he shows the dangers of turning these ideals into ideology. But "Masquerade" is not a romantic drama. This is a drama about romanticism, that is, about how the ideals of romantic culture can be perverted into an ideology that deceives and destroys people, destroying their unique existence, instead of elevating them. "Masquerade" is a variant of Lermontov's reaction to the difficulties that arose in his post–romantic, transitional time. Conveying his admiration for the ideals of romantic culture, Lermontov embodies one of the types of reaction to the realization of the decline of these ideals – the stereotypical reduction of the romantic worldview and values to a set of ideological concepts. But by portraying Arbenin, Lermontov hints at the possibility of recognizing that the worldview and values of Romanticism are losing their authority and integrity and that turning them into an ideology does not compensate for this loss. We need to find a new worldview, new values, new ideals. (shrink)

Anton Tchekhov (Creation from the void)--The gift of prophecy.--Penultimate words.--The theory of knowledge.--Books of Shestov (p. xxv-xxvi).

The paper is devoted to analysis of P. Benacerraf’s argument against set-theoretic reductionist realism which is a fragment of a broader argument, know as the “identification problem”. The analyzed fragment of P. Benacerraf’s argument concerns the possibility of reducing of mathematical notions to set-theoretic notions. The paper presents a reconstruction of P. Benacerraf’s original argumentation, its analysis and also several possible objections proposed by P. Benacerraf himself about 30 years later after the original publication. Namely, he claimed (1) that a (...) set-theoretic definition of natural numbers in G. Frege’s fashion can serve as a proper and unique set-theoretic definition, (2) that his argument doesn’t undermine eliminative reductionsts’ position, (3) that even if there are no argument possible in favor of some particular set-theoretic definition of natural numbers one may take set-theoretic realism for granted. An analysis of the mentioned possible objections shows their dependence on a number of additional premises. The paper demonstrates that P. Benacerraf’s objections on his own argument against set-theoretic realism either have a pragmatic character themselves or essentially rely on additional arguments that are justified pragmatically or require additional argumentation. For example, his possible objections require that set theory is considered as the only true foundational theory in mathematics, and that it has several important pragmatic virtues, like convenience of use to formalize other mathematical theories. In some cases, P. Benacerraf’s objections on their own, or the indicated additional principles may well be called into question, which demonstrates the insufficiency of P. Benacerraf’s objections against his original argument. Without the mentioned pragmatic arguments P. Benacerraf’s objections become a kind of belief in mysticism. Accordingly, his doubts about his own argument against set-theoretical realism seem insufficient to reject the problem of identification and save the position of set-theoretical realism from collapse. (shrink)

The Evrazijstvo movement was an intellectual current which recognized the Revolution of 1917 as a fateful event and conceived itself as a third way for Russia between individualism and Soviet Communism. At the philosophical level Evrazijstvo was an extension of the Russian Idea. Basing himself on the principle of All-Unity Karsavin put his concept of the symphonic personality to work in critically referring to the philosophical concepts and methodological approaches then current in Europe. The Evrazijstvo idea was later to (...) be reduced to the idea of the political power of ideocracy, an ideology of dictatorship and power, which raised sympathies for the strong state of the Soviet dictatorship, thus failing to provide a real alternative to the latter. (shrink)

The Evrazijstvo movement was an intellectual current which recognized the Revolution of 1917 as a fateful event and conceived itself as a “third way” for Russia between individualism and Soviet Communism. At the philosophical level Evrazijstvo was an extension of the Russian Idea. Basing himself on the principle of “All-Unity” Karsavin put his concept of the “symphonic personality” to work in critically referring to the philosophical concepts and methodological approaches then current in Europe. The Evrazijstvo idea was later to (...) be reduced to the idea of the political power of ideocracy, an ideology of dictatorship and power, which raised sympathies for the “strong state” of the Soviet dictatorship, thus failing to provide a real alternative to the latter. (shrink)

This article introduces the theological and philosophical thoughts of Lev Karsavin, who was one of the most creative representatives of Russian religious philosophy in the early 20th century. His conception was historically the last amongst the great systems of Russian metaphysics of all-unity. This conception gave an opportunity for developing an understanding of the relations between God and the world, and the act of creation as gift of God.

В монографии на основе архивных источников и воспоминаний современников комплексно исследуются творческая биография, научные воззрения, основные труды Льва Карсавина.

The need for new models of social development capable of increasing the resilience of society and of counteracting the destructive processes that ruined a once-powerful state edifice has led to an interest in Eurasianism-a philosophical-historical, culturological, and intellectual-political movement that arose in Russian émigré circles in the early 1920s. Eurasianism made itself known by the publication in 1921 in Sofia of a collection with the symbolic title Exodus to the East [Iskhod k Vostoku]. The initiators of this work were the (...) economist and geographer P.N. Savitskii, the linguist N.S. Trubetskoi, the theologian and philosopher G.V. Florovskii, and the art critic P.P. Suvchinskii. The legal scholar N.N. Alekseev, the historian and philosopher L.P. Karsavin, the historian G.V. Vernadskii, and other eminent Russian émigré scholarly and cultural figures also took part in the movement. (shrink)

This article examines the metaphysics of Lev Platonovich Karsavin, which absorbed the specific features of the life of this Russian theologian, philosopher, scholar, and poet and his lo...

A brief outline of L.P.Karsavin's theory of personality is presented, which reconstructs the system of key concepts of this theory and traces its evolution through Karsavin's work. The system is analyzed in its relation to the two basic paradigms of European personalist thought, the anthropological paradigm developed in Western metaphysics, and the theological paradigm created by the Greek Church Fathers and practically not used in European philosophy. The conclusion is drawn that Karsavin's personalism returns gradually to the (...) theological paradigm and via the works of Vladimir Lossky it stimulated the contemporary renaissance of this paradigm in Orthodox theology. (shrink)

At last, Russia has begun to speak in a truly original voice." So said Anatoly Vaneev, a Soviet dissident who became Karsavin's disciple in the Siberian gulag where the philosopher spent his last two years. The book traces the unusual trajectory of this inspiring voice: Karsavin started his career as Russia's brightest historian of Catholic mysticism; however, his radical methods - which were far ahead of their time - shocked his conservative colleagues. The shock continued when Karsavin (...) turned to philosophy, writing flamboyant and dense essays in a polyphonic style, which both Marxists and religious traditionalists found provocative. There was no let-up after he was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia: in exile, he became a leading theorist in the Eurasian political movement, combining Orthodox theology with a left-wing political orientation. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is a specific form of cosmogony—the conception of cosmogonic objectivation, interpreted as a tragedy or cosmogonic fall. This conception is examined on the basis of the evidence furnished by two sets of materials: firstly, the original texts and paraphrases of the Valentinian Gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and secondly, the writings of the Russian philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin and Nikolay Berdyaev. The research reveals a series of specific features common to (...) both of these: in particular, the conception of cosmogonic objectivation appears to be connected with the doctrine of the absolute person’s fall, and with the motive of self-alienation. (shrink)

The review is devoted to a new book by the writer and literary historian Natalia A. Gromova, in which, on the basis of letters and archival documents, the love story of Varvara Malahieva-Mirovich and Lev Shestov is reconstructed. According to Gromova, their relationship became an impulse that had a key influence on the formation of Shestov as an existential thinker, whose philosophy is not based on speculative contemplation, but is inextricably linked with life experience. Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy grows out (...) of the relationship between Shestov and Malakhieva-Mirovich. On the basis of Shestov’s letters addressed to Malahieva-Mirovich, recently found in the family archive of Shik-Shakhovskie, the author of the book reconstructs the autobiographical events of the philosopher’s life, when for him “the time is out of joint” and he experienced an ideological and psychological crisis that marked the beginning of a new stage in his work. Gromova shows how the events of his life are reflected in Shestov’s writings: in his writings, the philosopher seeks answers to the questions that his relationship with Varvara Malahieva-Mirovich poses to him. Gromova introduces into scientific circulation the previously unpublished correspondence between Shestov and Malahieva-Mirovich, letters from Malahieva-Mirovich to her friend Leonilla N. Tarasova, as well as the memoirs of Malahieva-Mirovich about the actress of the Moscow Art Theater Nadezhda S. Butova. The book contains unique information about Shestov’s circle in Russia (for example, about the decadent poetess Anastasia Mirovich), including the so-called “shestovites”, a.i. the poetess and writer Varvara G. Malahieva-Mirovich, philosopher, lawyer and publisher Semyon M. Lurie, actress Nadezhda S. Butova, who is trying to find a philosophical and religious “justification” for the actor’s craft. (shrink)

The philosopher Lev Shestov aimed to establish a new free way of thinking, which manifested itself as a struggle against the delusion that we have a rational grasp of the necessary truths on matters that are of the greatest importance to us, such as the questions of life and death. Philosophy, as the Russian philosopher understood it, is not pure thinking, but ‘some kind of inner doing, inner regeneration, or second birth’ (Shestov in Lektsii po Istorii Grecheskoi Filosofii [Lectures on (...) the history of Greek philosophy], YMCA-PRESS, Moscow, 2001, p. 53). Having adopted the notion of the ‘regeneration of one’s convictions’ from Dostoevsky’s vocabulary in his earlier works, Shestov developed the idea of ‘awakening’ further in his mature thought, in which the motif of ‘awakening’ comprised one of the main ideas of his philosophy: the fight for the individual’s right to freedom and to creative transformation at a time when she is in despair or on the brink of death. In this article, I analyse Shestov’s idea of ‘awakening’ as one of the key tropes and developmental characteristics of his philosophical vision. In particular, I argue that, having stemmed from Shestov’s earlier interpretations of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Plotinus, in his later writings, the notion of ‘awakening’—the possibility of a fundamental, inner transformation of one’s worldview (probuzhdenie, pererozhdenie)—marked the beginning of a new salvific mode in his writing. (shrink)

This article presents the understanding of Eurasianism as an expression of Russia’s essence in the works of N.S. Trubetskoi, P.P. Suvchinskii, P.N. Savitskii, and L.P. Karsavin. We use the cognitive category “historical collective individuality” for a more complete and deeper understanding of Eurasianism as a set of views and approaches, as well as a certain specialized social community of its representatives. The use of this category allows us to reveal Eurasianism as an area of ideas expressing the essence of (...) Russia. N.S. Trubetskoi considers Russian-Turanian unity to be just such an expression of that essence; for P.N. Savitskii, it is the circle of “European and Asiatic/Asian cultures”; for P.P. Suvchinskii, Russia’s great testament is the unification of the people and the intelligentsia under the “all-resolving dome of the Orthodox Church”; and for L.P. Karsavin, Russia’s essence consists in its development as a Eurasian subject or a collective person. In addition, the category of historical collective individuality allows us to reveal Eurasianism as a “gold reserve of life” for Eurasians in exile. Thus, the unity of metaphysics and life sought in Russian philosophy is achieved. We draw conclusions about the historicity of the Eurasianist collective individuality. (shrink)

The human being has always been one of the most concerned propositions in philosophy, but after the philosophy of subjectivity, the theory of personality has entered a vacuum state, and the existentialist notion that man’s existence precedes his essence became theoretically dominant. However, for Lev Karcavin, a Russian religious philosopher in the 20th century, the man had already acquired his specialty in their Personal God, Jesus Christ. Being is the existence of individuality, its origin is the hypostasis of God, and (...) man becomes a non-perfect individual existence by participating in the hypostasis of God, but it still reflects some extent the perfect image of the Holy Trinity and makes it its mission to realize this perfect image. Moreover, human existence of consciousness is all-united for his participation in a divine being; it’s an organic fusion of all existence beyond the individual, where each individual is not only himself but also an individual “larger” than himself—the harmonious individual. The world in its ultimate sense is a harmonious unity of individuality composed of different individuals in a hierarchical order, in which the individual and the world, the instant and the eternal, are dialectically united. (shrink)

The article is devoted to philosophical anthropology in the works of Russian religious thinkers of the 20 th century during their period of emigration. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the main approaches to understanding human nature and its image in the philosophy of Russia abroad. The article identifies a common direction in the development of anthropological concepts, despite individual differences in the views of Russian religious philosophers. The review and analysis begin with the personalism of N.A. Berdyaev, who (...) considered the problem of man to be central to philosophy. In his work The Fate of Man in the Modern World, Berdyaev offered a personal understanding of the new epoch of the 20 th century and proposed his own project of Christian anthropology. His intellectual ally, B.P. Vysheslavtsev, in the book The Ethics of Transfigured Eros, developed an interpretation of anthropological ideas based on an original understanding of the conscious and unconscious in man. Vysheslavtsev extended his ethical framework by introducing the concept of self-knowledge, which he considers the essence of a creative personality. The article further examines the book Reality and Man by S.L. Frank, which provides a comprehensive view of this philosopher’s anthropological beliefs. The foundation for Frank’s anthropology is the idea of personal being, which has been substantiated and developed in Christian thought. L.P. Karsavin developed anthropology from the perspective of the philosophy of all-unity, understanding individual personality as dependent on higher (“symphonic”) personalities. He fully incorporated the doctrine of personality into the metaphysics of all-unity, in which the Trinity serves as the main principle in the development of the entire created world. The last section of the article delves into an analysis of anthropological ideas as presented in the works of V.V. Zenkovsky. In his work Principles of Orthodox Anthropology, Zenkovsky built his argument on the image of God found in human consciousness and justified an anthropological ideal grounded in church doctrine and Orthodox theology. According to the author of the article, all the considered thinkers of Russia abroad recognized the significance of philosophical anthropology and the need for its further substantiation in the context of the Christian worldview. (shrink)

Russian translation of Horwich P. What Is It Like to Be a Deflationary Theory of Meaning? // Philosophical Issues, 5, 1994. Translated by Lev Lamberov with kind permission of the author.

The author uses the conceptual and methodological apparatus of social constructivism, perspectivism and phenomenology to discuss the phenomenon of the invisible enemy in the context of modern warfare. The concept of the invisible enemy is explicated in the works of Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin, Ernst Jünger, Fyodor Stepun and other authors. The article substantiates the legitimacy of the semantic expan­sion of this concept and the possibility of its application to a number of objects. It reveals such personifica­ tions of (...) the invisible enemy as a victim and a violent actor, a fighter and an intelligence officer, a collective and an individual subject. The relationship between the traditional identity of the combatant («the killing one – the one to be killed») and the anthropological structure «the seeing one – the visible one», which is being destroyed in modern wars, are also exposed. The inversion of the categories «visible» and «invisible» in the context of military activity is substantiated. (shrink)

Russian translation of Horwich P. Deflationary Truth and the Problem of Aboutness // Philosophical Issues, 8, 1997. Translated by Lev Lamberov with kind permission of the author.

The essay deals with the formation of the Greimassian thought from its earliest origins in his young years at Kaunas University, i.e. his connections with Wilhelm Sesemann, Lev Karsavin and Russian formalism, to the rise of structuralism in Paris. The Paris School approach stems from Semantique structurale (1967) leading to the ‘third semiotic revolution’, as Greimas called it, by the invention of the modalities. This made his method close to even analytic philosophy and modal logics. In both, a linguistic (...) turn and use of formal logics took place. Yet Greimas’ semiotics grew out of a purely linguistic framework into a broader philosophical approach. Nowadays, considered one of the classics of the semiotic scene, his method still has not lost anything of its analytic acuity and epistemic temptation. Even such new paradigms as existential semiotics grow organically from some Greimas’ ideas which have kept their relevance.В статье исследуется формирование научных взглядов Греймаса: юность в Каунасском университете, знакомство с Василием Сеземаном, Львом Карсавиным и идеями русского формализма, рождение структурализма в Париже. Основой парижской школы семиотики стала книга Греймаса Semantique structurale (1967), которая, по его словам, привела к ≪третьей семиотической революции≫ благодаря изобретению модальностей. Это сблизило метод Греймаса с аналитической философией и модальной логикой. В обеих науках произошел лингвистический поворот и стали пользоваться формальной логикой. Семиотика Греймаса преодолела рамки чистой лингвистики, став более широким философским подходом. Сейчас его метод считается классикой семиотики. Однако метод Греймаса не потерял своей аналитической остроты и эпистемологической привлекательности. Даже такие новые парадигмы, как экзистенциальная семиотика, органически вырастают из идей Греймаса, сохранивших свою актуальность.Artikkel kasitleb Greimase mottemaailma valjakujunemist alates selle varaseimatest allikatest, mis parinesid noorusaastatest Kaunase Ulikoolis, s.t tema sidemetest Wilhelm Sesemanni, Lev Karsavini ja vene vormikoolkonnaga, kuni strukturalismi tekkimiseni Pariisis. Pariisi koolkonna lahenemise aluseks on Semantique structurale (1967), mis toob kaasa “kolmanda semiootilise revolutsiooni”, nagu Greimas seda nimetas, leiutades modaalsused. See muutis tema meetodi sarnaseks ingliskeelse analuutilise fi losoofi a ja modaalloogikaga, kus molemas toimus lingvistiline poore ning hakati kasutama formaalloogikat. Ent Greimase semiootika kasvas puhtlingvistilisest raamistikust valja avaramaks fi losoofi liseks lahenemiseks. Tanapaeval, mil tema meetodit peetakse semiootikavaldkonna klassikasse kuuluvaks, ei ole see kaotanud midagi oma analuutilisest teravusest ja episteemilisest koitvusest. Isegi sellised uued paradigmad nagu eksistentsiaalne semiootika kasvavad orgaaniliselt valja monedest Greimase ideedest, mis on sailitanud oma relevantsuse. (shrink)

Russian translation of Horwich P. What Is It Like to Be a Deflationary Theory of Meaning? // Philosophical Issues, 5, 1994. Translated by Lev Lamberov with kind permission of the author.