In the 16th century, Moscow proclaimed itself to be the the third Rome and discovered the special way or Russian Orthodox Messianism doctrine. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of Russia's unique global historical role went beyond exclusively church discussions, and the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome acquired an important place in the structure of imperial ideology. Even after a break with the past, after the 1917 October Revolution, the country did not abandon the idea of Messianism, which (...) organically fitted into the structure of Soviet ideology. At the same time, reanimation of messianic moods was carried out here in the format of the doctrine of the World Republic of Soviets and/or World Revolution. Of course, some backbone elements of old Messianism underwent a significant transformation, which can hardly be called secularization. The purpose of this article is to show that the time 1917 mid-1930s may be described with the help of a peculiar dialectic, as the unity of a radical break with the past and the specifically manifested continuity with it. Subsequently, despite large-scale changes, the idea of the peculiarity of the Russian way, firstly in Soviet and then in Russian society, including the specific perception of its past, continued to remain an influential political brand. This kind of discourse should be considered highly archaic today; however, it does not become an attribute of the distant past, retaining the attractiveness and even acquiring state ideology. (shrink)

In 2020 the international philosophical community celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel. This anniversary provides an excellent opportunity to once again reconsider to the iconic works of the great German philosopher, among them, special attention should be paid to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is universally considered as one of the most famous works of world philosophical literature. Being the first of Hegel’s major works and, at the same time, the first and only part of (...) the early version of his system of absolute idealism, this book, largely due to the efforts of the French Neo-Hegelians, acquired the status of one of the most famous philosophical works. Meanwhile, The Phenomenology of the Spirit is rightfully considered one of the most complex philosophical texts, which does not cease to attract attention, including due to the intricacies of its style. Being called by K. Marx “the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy,” this work, among other numerous “secrets” and “mysteries,” undoubtedly hides the mystery associated with the terminological and stylistic features of Hegel’s writing. Noting the serious difficulties encountered in reading The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the author of the article shows that Hegel wrote it, developing a new philosophical language, creating a range of linguistic innovations, also using Germanized Latin and Greek terms. Along with Spinoza’s Latin terminology, he borrowed some concepts from his compatriots, deliberately altering their meaning. The article also shows that, being an extremely complex philosophical work, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit had a huge impact on the development of intellectual culture of the 20th century, and not only due to its conceptions. Its language itself greatly contributed to the formation of special philosophical terminology and anticipated a number of significant changes in the structure and composition of philosophical texts. (shrink)

Following Deleuze’s analysis of expressivity, this article approaches the two opening aphorisms of the Dao De Jing 道德經 as two movements of a triadic differentiation of expressive elements. These aphorisms are further presented within four Deleuzean paradoxes which necessarily accompany linguistic expression. Simultaneously, the opening lines are also analyzed as philosophical problems which constitute the core of the Daoist project itself within which the unthinkable or ineffable must be conceived of not as conditioned by privation or negation, but as being (...) located within the movement of differentiation which is by nature positive and creative. As the paper shows, the linguistic involvement here is not one of discrimination but of a fundamentally dynamic immersion in problematic thought which underlies the mechanism of sense-making. This dynamism is presupposed by the disequilibrium between what expresses itself and its expressions, which is the birthplace of sense as the expressed. Our analysis of the latter is unfolded through an analogy drawn between Daoist and Spinozian expressionism supported by Deleuze’s study on Spinoza. (shrink)

The interpretation of Kant’s philosophy by thinkers in pre-Soviet Belarus has been the subject of not a few publications. They described the reception of his seminal ideas, the analysis, polemic and occasionally sharp criticism of these ideas. It is helpful now to look at Kantian studies beginning from the 1920s to the present time. I will show that immediately after the October 1917 revolution and until the 1930s interest in Kant’s teaching was waning. When they turned to his ideas during (...) that period Belarusian authors described and analysed them primarily in textbooks or when examining, or rather criticising, the views of Western philosophers, thereby rigidly adhering to Lenin’s assessments. During and after World War II the number of studies was also very insignificant. It was not until the beginning of Perestroika that an urgent need was felt for a new reading of Western philosophy, and interest in Kant’s heritage in the country increased sharply. A surge of interest was registered beginning from 2004 which was declared “Immanuel Kant Year” by UNESCO. From that time onward Belarus has hosted a number of international forums devoted to Kant, materials of conferences, articles and textbooks have been published, dissertations defended etc. The article reviews the main trends of these studies in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the controversy of Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov, the so-called “another Bolshevik”, with Lenin and his associates on the question of the revolution and the ways of building a socialist society and state. It is shown that Bogdanov expressed a critical attitude towards the revolution and its socialist nature, the ability of the proletariat to play a decisive role in it, and wrote about Russia’s unpreparedness for an anti-capitalist coup, thereby expressing a distinctly marked anti-Leninist position. Based (...) on the analysis of a large corpus of Bogdanov’s works, the authors focused their attention on the following aspects of his work relating to the theme of revolution: the contradictions between Bogdanov and Lenin in its interpretation even before October 1917; Bogdanov’s views on the revolution and real socialism after its completion; his interpretation and evaluation of “war communism”; the program for building socialism in the USSR and the search for ways to form fundamentally new social structures developed in the context of the science of tectology, created by him; Bogdanov’s project “Proletkult” and his utopian novels, in which he foresaw how “socialism in one country” would be built and how the transition from the old exploitative to new forms of human coexistence would be carried out, as well as the danger of the degeneration of democracy into a dictatorship. (shrink)

The article problematizes the relatively recent tradition (initiated by O.M. Medushevskaya and picked up by a number of researchers) of a phenomenological interpretation of A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii’s historical and methodological work. The article aims to find out whether, and if so, in what sense (senses) it is possible to talk about the phenomenology of Lappo-Danilevskii. It shows the grounds on which this interpretation can, within certain limits, be accepted, and the moments of principal divergence between classical phenomenology and Lappo-Danilevskii’s methodology (...) of history. The key point of these discrepancies is the phenomenological reduction, which is the essence of the phenomenological method, and, in the author’s opinion and contrary to the opinion of some researchers, is absent in the methodology of history of Lappo-Danilevskii. The theoretical positions that provoke the comparison of the views of Lappo-Danilevskii and Husserl are reduced to two main points: the problem of the psychological impenetrability of someone else’s Self and the understanding of the historical source as a construction of the historian. The article suggests that the “phenomenological motives” of Lappo-Danilevskii’s work are determined by the general philosophical and epistemological search of his time, perceived by Lappo-Danilevskii through the works of I. G. Droysen, Russian Neo-Kantianism and W. Dilthey, but hardly directly from Husserl’s philosophy, with which he could not be thoroughly familiar. The author suggests qualifying Lappo-Danilevskii’s methodological work as an original version of historical phenomenology, which was formed outside the direct influence of the classical phenomenology of Husserl. The article outlines the directions of further development of the problems laid down in Lappo-Danilevskii’s methodology of history, in particular, O. M. Medushevskaya’s “cognitive history,” A. L. Yurganov’s “historical phenomenology” and the sociological turn in the methodology of historical knowledge (turn from a subject to an actor) fixed by M. F. Rumyantseva. The latter, according to the author of the article, actualizes the key problem of the phenomenological tradition—that of intersubjectivity. (shrink)