Publications

In this article I analyse retrospectively main directions in the interpretation of the notion sobornost’ in modern Russian philosophical thought. Key for religious Russian Philosophy on the border of the XIX - XX centuries, this term hasn't lost its importance today, but it has acquired some new senses and significations. Religious-philosophical and epistemological notion first and foremost, it was transformed into ontological and anthropological category, what allowed to describe the Russian national current community as "conciliarity" corresponding to “Russian idea”.

Malevich has usually perceived as revolutionist and iconoclast, and completely not as divine worshiper.  Meanwhile, those are two interconnected sides of his intellectual activity, and probably his way of glorification of God demanded revolutionary form at his time. In this article, I would like to show Malevich not only as art theorist, as it ordinarily applied, but as metaphysician, and even religious metaphysician. Still it can be said, that Malevich’s theoretical legacy haven’t been understood properly. The situation is this because only ten years has passed since the most complete collected edition of his works by the editorship of Alexandra Shatskikh have seen the light of the day. 

The paper deals with St. Basil's distinction between κήρυγμα (kerygma) and δόγμα (dogma), which has been the subject of much discussion over the last sixty years (Spir. XXVII.66-67).

Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age makes a powerful case for the autonomy of modernity with regard to the preceding Christian epoch – but it also emphasizes at least one continuity between the two, which can be framed via what Blumenberg casts as their common enemy: Gnosticism. Far from being external or secondary, this opposition to Gnosticism structurally defines both of these epochs as their task. What is, however, at stake in this common task? Reading with and against Blumenberg – and following his own account of the epochal shift to modernity – we will shed light, first, on the genealogy and, secondly, the political theology of Blumenbergian modernity, its structure of sovereignty, and key related concepts, such as the world, position, possibility, legitimation, theodicy, immanence, and self-assertion.

This is my review of the 'Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the School of London' exhibtion at the Pushkin Museum

Two years ago, the International Laboratory for the study of Russian and European intellectual dialogue was established in the National Research University “The Higher School of Economics” by professor Vladimir Kantor on the Russian side and by the German professor Leonid Luks on the Western European side. In the two years of its work the Laboratory has organized six international conferences. The first three events were held under the auspices of the commemorative project “Russia one hundred years after the revolution of 1917,” which analyzed and discussed not only the spiritual, cultural and social-political causes of the emergence of the revolutionary situation in Russia, but also its historical and civilizational consequences for the fate of Russia, Europe and the world. A review of these conferences was published in the first issue of the journal Zeitschrift für Slawistik in 2018.

This paper is devoted to the controversy of the first theistic thinkers of the Moscow Theological Academy (F. Golubinskiy and V. Kudryavtsev-Platonov) with the philosophy of religion of the German idealists. Both Russian thinkers came under the influence of F. H. Jacobi. They defend the Orthodox world view; in addition, their apology of theism differs from the similar apology of the German theists. Firstly, the Russian theists must defend the supranaturalist doctrine of direct external divine action on the human soul. Secondly, they try to accommodate new philosophical ideas and concepts (foremost, the doctrine of religious sentiment) to the traditional “dogmatic” metaphysical tradition. These traits sets Russian speculative sentimental theism apart from the German philosophy of sentiment of faith and at the same time brings them close to the French Catholic philosophy of the 18–19th centuries.

Paul Horwich has advocated and attributed to the later Wittgenstein a “use-theory of meaning” that aims to demystify meaning by reducing it to pure regularities of use. This chapter challenges Horwich’s appropriation of Wittgenstein and seeks to make room for a different conception of the demystification of meaning. It argues that Wittgenstein does indeed aim to demystify meaning, but does not think that this involves any attempt to reduce meaning to something else.

The article "Die flimmernde Natur der Doxa: zwischen dem Durchbruch der Befangenheit und der Gefangenschaft" deals with problems of dogmatical thinking and doxa as they are presented in philosophy of Eugen Fink (1905-1975).

This article is about the conception of the tyranny in the European Political Thought of the Middle Ages. The author begins with the traditional distinction between a good and a bad governor.  Within this dichotomy, the king is a good and fair ruler, whose thoughts are about a commonweal and a public good; in turn, the tyrant is a governor whose thoughts and acts are towards his personal good and interests. But - the author stresses this point - this conception in effect appeared late enough, at 12th or 13th cent.

The author analyses this fact, stressing that within the European Political thought of the Middle Ages it seems possible to define two principal modes of speaking on the Political: the theological and the juridical one. In turn, within the theological mode, we find two main branches, which are the political Augustinism and the political Thomism. The first one is a direct successor of the Roman Republican tradition developed by Cicero and, later, by the Roman jurists. Within this tradition, the main hero of the political theory is a people, which is considered as an autonomous subject, able to legislate and to define his proper public good. The other, Thomistic paradigm, interprets a people as a multitude united by a common area, laws and mode of life, a pure object of the political action, exercised by kings and other rulers. The author stresses, including on the ground of the Siete Partidas, that the real theory of the tyranny is possible only within the frames of the Thomistic paradigm.

We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phenomenology using Viktor Shklovsky's theory of 'estrangement' (ostranenie). In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art 'forces us into' the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomenological epoché drives us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrangement is an artistic device that breaks the routinised forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just "recognise" it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art - in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing, or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the 'ready-made', 'taken for granted', 'pre-given' meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilised, the "meaning-in-formation". It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes (or, following a Husserlian metaphor, 'double bookkeeping') can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson's theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of 'double life in two attitudes' uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalisation of ostranenie can lead even to 'meta-estrangement': to estrangement of the everyday 'lack of estrangement'. We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context.

Drawing on Pier Paolo Pasolini and his appropriation of Wittgenstein, this paper argues for the possibility of a radical sort of social critique based on the notion of form of life: the members of a society may not only have an objectionable form of life, but also lacka form of life altogether.

This text begins by applying the critique of phrenology to contemporary neuro-science in order to raise, once again, the question of consciousness. I then argue that consciousness is a process and product of the body, driven by history; like the work (and a work) of art. This becomes clearer with Hegel’s differentiation between human and animal consciousness, that is, in how our language and thought can tolerate contradiction, even grasp it as true. Thus, as Aristotle knew: consciousness is to the body as the sign is to the referent—and this has implications for our very survival.

This paper provides a foundation for a form of phenomenology, namely phenomenological, that rejects the traditional phenomenology of religion in order to provide a cognitive and non-theological discipline in the study of religion. Proposed amendments to phenomenology are based on the ideas of E. Husserl. The simultaneous strict distinction and necessary cooperation between facts and phenomena provided by the impurity of pure consciousness in admitting the outside world might enable the extension of scientific criteria to this reimagined phenomenology. Pure consciousness is considered irreducible to thought and cognitivity (feeling and accordingly, faith, might thus be viewed as a non-cognitive, purely emotional stream). This new comprehension of the phenomenology of religion could represent religion in all its contexts (God, supernatural forces as well as holy places, churches, utensils, texts etc) in the pure consciousness of the believer, as the effects of its structures, namely feeling and thought and their interactions and peculiarities.

This article argues that our desire to manipulate and control nature through our use of technology is the cause of our current climate crisis. It then explores alternative ways of using technology and relating to the natural world.

The article discusses the cultural phenomenon of the Florentine Renaissance in relation to the aesthetic program of the art association “Mir Iskusstva” (“World of Art”). As Russian modernism reflects the transformation of artistic and spiritual culture that took place in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century, the author attempts to point out and analyze the main philosophical and aesthetic principles of the Italian Renaissance discussed among some of the important voices of the “World of Art” with particular attention on Sergej Djagilev and Aleksandr Benois. The author considers the logic of the continuity of artistic ideas of the Renaissance in the aesthetic concept of the founders of the “World of Art”. In order to demonstrate the strong link between the Renaissance past and the pre-revolutionary present the author analyzes the main literary, philosophical and memoir sources related to the legacy of Sergej Djagilev and Alexander Benois.  

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss (Seligkeit) assumes central importance throughout Schelling's oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810-11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero-point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here (from God before creation, via the natural, historical, and spiritual world, to the fully actualized, "true pantheism") and to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling's best efforts to theorize it as "love"; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity's foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling's conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present and the eschatological – as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity (with what is often called its process of "secularization") – not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves.