“Unofficial Thoughts” by Yakov Druskin January 29, 1948 Unofficial thoughts are thoughts not of reason, or even not founded in reason; and yet, certain thoughts of this kind are some of the most intelligent. This is something that Tolstoy never understood. Reason is official. Unofficial thoughts are fruitless, in the sense that they ..
Archives : January-2020
Other relevant keywords: Creativity, Dialectics, Ecology, Rationalism, Worldviews Piama Gaidenko (1934-2021) Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko has been a leading historian of West-European and Russian philosophy and intellectual history since the Khrushchev era. Her work bridges the Soviet/post-Soviet divide, displaying a consistent quality through her keen and attentive understanding of both individual texts, with a particular ..
Other relevant keywords: Aesthetics; Creativity; Personality; Social Conditioning; Society, Totalitarianism Lidiya Ginzburg (1902–1990) Lidiya Yakovlevna Ginzburg was a literary scholar, known as the most talented student of the Russian Formalists. She was also an author of innovative, analytical prose both philosophical and almost social-scientific, which inhabits the boundaries between the genres of autobiography and ..
Other relevant keywords: aesthetics, German philosophy, Russian philosophy Arseny Gulyga (1921-1996) Arseny Vladimirovich Gulyga is one of a few Soviet philosophers known not only in the Soviet Union, but also abroad. He specialized in the history of philosophy and composed a number of philosophical portraits in the genre of intellectual biography, including on Hegel (1970), ..
Other relevant keywords: Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology Sergey Horujy (1941-2020) Sergey Sergeevich Horujy was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist and mathematician, researcher of the Eastern Christian ascetic tradition of Hesychasm and of Russian philosophy, translator and commentator of James Joyce’s work, and one of the most prominent Russian philosophers of the contemporary period. He ..
Other relevant keywords: Decision Sciences; General Systems Theory; Positional and Combinatorial Styles; Predispositioning Theory Aron Katsenelinboigen (1927–2005) Aron Katsenelinboigen was the founder of Predispositioning Theory (PT) and the author of twenty books and numerous articles. Born in Ukraine, he earned his Ph.D. (1957) and Doctor Habilitatus (1966) at the Moscow State Institute of Economics ..
Other relevant keywords: border, pessimism Boris Khazanov (b. 1928) Boris Khazanov (a pseudonym of Gennady Faibusovich), a writer and an essayist, is one of the most significant representatives of Russian–Jewish philosophical personalism. Born in Leningrad, he was educated in classical philology at Moscow State University and was arrested in 1949 for “anti-Soviet” activity. Upon ..
Other relevant keywords: Atheism, Emigration, Political Philosophy, Solovyov Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) Born Aleksandr Kozhevnikov to a wealthy family of industrialists in Moscow, Alexandre Kojève garnered acclaim as a philosopher only after his emigration to Western Europe in 1920. His lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, held at the École pratique des hautes études in ..
Other relevant keywords: Inequity, Solovyov Anatolii Krasnov-Levitin (1915–1991) Anatolii Emmanuilovich Krasnov-Levitin was probably the most outspoken proponent of Christian socialism in the late USSR. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, his original surname was Levitin and he signed some of his works with the pseudonym “Krasnov,” from the Russian word krasnyi, “red.” (His name also appears ..
Other relevant keywords: Antinomy, Eidos, Essence, Name, Person, Symbol Aleksei Losev (1893 – 1988) A “philosopher of name, number, and myth,” in his own words, Aleksei Fedorovich Losev is an outstanding Russian thinker, philologist, classicist, translator, commentator, and writer (qtd. Takho-Godi, “Losev – filosofiia imeni, chisla, mifa”). The scope of his interests includes philosophy, philology, aesthetics, religion, ..