A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity

by Edited by G. M. Hamburg , Randall A. Poole

• ISBN13: 9780521884501
• ISBN10: 0521884500
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-05-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The great age of Russian philosophy spans the century between 1830 and 1930 - from the famous Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 1830s and 1840s, through the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the formation of a Russian 'philosophical emigration' in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This volume is a major new history and interpretation of Russian philosophy in this period. Eighteen chapters (plus a substantial introduction and afterword) discuss Russian philosophy's main figures, schools, and controversies, while simultaneously pursuing a common central theme: the development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defence of human dignity. As this volume shows, the century-long debate over the meaning and grounds of human dignity, freedom, and the just society involved thinkers of all backgrounds and positions, transcending easy classification as 'religious' or 'secular'. The debate still resonates strongly today.

Author Biography

G. M. HAMBURG is the Otho M. Behr Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. He has written, translated, and edited many books on Russian history, including Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881-1905 (1984), Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828-1866 (1992), Liberty, Equality, and the Market: Selected Essays of Boris Chicherin (1998), and Russian-Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus: Alternative Visions of the Conflict between Shamil and the Russians, 1830-1859 (2004) (with J. Thomas Sanders and Ernest Tucker).
Randall A. Poole is Associate Professor of History at the College of St. Scholastica. He has translated and edited Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy (2003) and written numerous articles and book chapters on Russian intellectual history and philosophy.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: The humanist tradition in Russian philosophy	p. 1
The Nineteenth Century
Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the birth of Russian philosophical humanism	p. 27
Alexander Herzen	p. 52
Materialism and the radical intelligentsia: the 1860s	p. 69
Russian ethical humanism: from populism to neo-idealism	p. 90
Russian Metaphysical Idealism in Defense of Human Dignity
Boris Chicherin and human dignity in history	p. 111
Vladimir Solov'ëv's philosophical anthropology: autonomy, dignity, perfectibility	p. 131
Russian Panpsychism: Kozlov, Lopatin, Losskii	p. 150
Humanity and Divinity in Russian Religious Philosophy after Solov'ëv
A Russian cosmodicy: Sergei Bulgakov's religious philosophy	p. 171
Pavel Florenskii's trinitarian humanism	p. 190
Semën Frank's expressivist humanism	p. 205
Freedom and Human Perfectibility in the Silver Age
Religious humanism in the Russian Silver Age	p. 227
Russian liberalism and the philosophy of law	p. 248
Imagination and ideology in the new religious consciousness	p. 266
Eschatology and hope in Silver Age thought	p. 285
Russian Philosophy in Revolution and Exile
Russian Marxism	p. 305
Adventures in dialectic and intuition: Shpet, Il'in, Losev	p. 326
Nikolai Berdiaev and the philosophical tasks of the emigration	p. 346
Eurasianism: affirming the person in an "era of faith"	p. 363
Afterword: On persons as open-ended ends-in-themselves (the view from two novelists and two critics)	p. 381
Bibliography	p. 391
Index	p. 406
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