Maja Soboleva

The bibliography of works discussing Russian Marxism is huge, making it very difficult to give an original interpretation of this phenomenon. To distinguish myself from the interpretative mainstream, I do not focus on persons and chronology, but rather investigate the question whether there was a specific logic in the unfolding of Russian Marxism which led to its consolidation into a specific doctrine, focusing on dialectical and historical materialism, during the Soviet period, and transformed it from a pluralistic philosophy into the monolithic official ideology of the Russian Communist Party. I concentrate on some theoretical and epistemological problems discussed by Russian Marxists, such as whether dialectical materialism is a theory or a methodology, whether dialectics is a logical or ontological category, what the term “dialectical materialism” exactly means, and what the materialistic understanding of cognition and the core assumption of historical materialism are. Accordingly, my approach has a reconstructive character: I focus on some fundamental propositions of Soviet Marxism which are recorded in textbooks on philosophy and try to recover their philosophical genesis. Thus my scope is restricted to a selection of relevant discussion points, allowing me to keep the philosophical discussions separate from political controversies.

The article focuses on a phenomenological study of political action. The analysis includes three directions: the concept of action, paradigms that determine political actions, and the purpose of action. In the analysis of action, I first use the distinction between the concepts of “act” and “operate.” “To act” means a conscious, deliberate, rational action. In contrast, “operate” means to behave unconsciously, mechanically or automatically, passively or instinctively. The political implications of the distinction between an “acting” and “operating” person can be formulated in the terms “freedom of action” and “coercion to operate,” and the latter can be used as a criterion for determining the type of social system, as well as for evaluating the correlated psychological state of society. As the next step, I analyse the action as a process and a result. I argue that in the social sphere, action appears as the sum of these moments, and the social sphere is a derivate of action. The last aspect of the analysis of action is responsibility. I claim that responsibility can be interpreted as the awareness and recognition by the individual of her role in history. The second part of the work is the study of paradigms and rules of political action in so-called open and closed societies. I claim that political action within the framework of an open society is limited only by legislation. In a closed society, political action is practically impossible: citizens do not act, but “operate” since there are no conditions for actions. After that, I analyse the role of social myths as a factor affecting people’s political activities. In the last part, I analyse the ultimate goal of political action. Traditionally, political philosophy assumes that the goals of politics are exhausted by the problems of relationship between the state and the individual. However, based on the theory of Hannah Arendt, it is possible to formulate the task of political action as the achievement of humanism in a human being, taken not in her relation to the state but in relation to herself. I argue that the minimal political action that can be qualified as humanism consists of the ability and courage to use one’s own mind.

The purpose of my essay is to contribute to dispelling the puzzle of our self-knowledge by analyzing the transcendental and empiricist approaches of Kant and John Perry. The guiding argument is to examine whether a position advocating the empirical consciousness we have of our mental states may explain self-knowledge and personal identity sufficiently or whether it should amount to Kantian standards set by his transcendental theory of knowledge. My hypothesis includes three aspects. First, I argue that our whole experience originates from the same transcendental structure of the human mind. From this, it follows that systematic knowledge is impossible for a “selfless” subject. Second, I differentiate between transcendental self-consciousness and empirical self-knowledge and apply these methodological tools to analyze knowledge from the first-person perspective. Third, I reconstruct the Kantian notion of personal identity and demonstrate that the epistemological problem of personal identity can only be sound when formulated as a transcendental-logical problem.

The subject of the work's analysis is the phrase Time, forward!. It seems that, on the one hand, this statement can be given a sociological interpretation. In this case, its content is the idea of acceleration and purposefulness of the big, collective time, which dominates the individual and determines his life. On the other hand, referring to Hegel, one can identify the project of Enlightenment behind this phrase. It involves the movement of the spirit from a state of alienation from itself in the object's idea to itself through the achievement of autonomy in the belief of concepts tested by its reflection alone. The socially significant meaning of such a speculative thinking project is to get rid of the despotism of dominant opinions on the path of critical, dialectical, and speculative thinking.

The article analyzes the metaphor “Copernican revolution,” used by Kant to highlight the core idea of his philosophy. The author argues that Kant uses the analogies with mathematics and natural science for establishing criteria of scientific character of knowledge. These criteria include the hypothetic-deductive or a priorimethod of thinking, which determines the apodictic, i.e. necessary and objective, character of the basic laws of nature, as well as the verification of laws a priorithrough experiments.The author focuses on Kant’s idea of the possibility of scientific metaphysics based on these criteria. She claims that the structure of scientific metaphysics and the epistemological status of its statements depend on what kind of objects it deals with: with phenomena given to us by sensuality, with only conceivable “things in themselves” or with supersensitive “objects of an idea.” In the last part, the author interprets the meaning of the metaphor “Copernican turn” as the upgrading of logic, the idea of “transcendental idealism” and discusses the possibility of using the metaphor “Ptolemaic system” to characterize the practical philosophy of Kant.

The issue of the nature of cognitive experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent works on epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. During this debate, the relevance of Kant to contemporary theories of cognition has been re-discovered. However, participants in this debate disagree whether Kant was a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, with regard to the character of intuitions. The central point of controversy concerns whether or not Kant’s sensible intuitions involve understanding and have a conceptual content. In this paper, I show that, despite their disagreements, both sides share a number of common presuppositions, which have determined a biased framework for the reading of Kant. My principal aim in this article is to reconcile the case for conceptualism with those interpretations which argue that intentionality and conceptuality can be separated. To achieve it, I present my own reconstruction of Kant’s theory of cognition, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction, and offer a new interpretation of Kantian conceptualism.

The question in the background of this article is what kind of epistemology can emerge on the basis of the philosophy of life. To answer this question, the theories of Georg Misch (1878–1965) and Josef König (1893–1974) have been analysed. Both authors differentiate between the analytic discourse of theoretical (scientific) approaches to the world and the synthetic discourse of non-theoretical (non-scien¬tific) objectifications of life which create a human semantic environment. For Misch, the former is constituted with “discursive” and the later with “evocative” utterances. For König as developed in his work “Sein und Denken”, “determining” and “modifying” predicates oppose each other as cardinally different cognitive and epistemological entities. The article focuses on König′s analysis of the genesis and logics of “determining” and “modifying” predication following the strategy of his book. In conclusion some controversies between Misch′s and König′s conceptions of a language constitution of the world are represented and discussed.

The paper focuses on Alois Riehl’s argument for a critical realism, and its defence against idealistic and naive realistic positions. The specific feature of Riehl’s approach, I argue, is the combination of positive sciences with the Kantian transcendental philosophy. Therefore, his methodology can be characterized as transcendental realism. The basic principle of this form of realism is the differentiation of the being of objects (das Sein der Objekte) from the being as object (Objektsein). The methodological primacy of this principle allows for its definition as Riehl- Axiom. In my paper, I demonstrate how this axiom works in Riehl’s justification of realism through the separating of epistemological and ontological questioning.

The paper focuses on the rediscovery of Misch’s A History of Autobiography and its relevance to the problem of self-knowledge and self-esteem. Misch’s work is used to reconstruct a new aspect of self-esteem and to demonstrate that self-esteem can be interpreted as an early historical form of self-knowledge. In particular, self-esteem is characterized as a kind of self-knowledge in the category of the Other, that is, self-esteem appears to be self-knowledge derived from the social perspective regarding the individual.

The question standing in the backgrounds of this paper is what kind of hermeneutics can emerge on basis of philosophy of life. To answer it, the theories of German philosophers Georg Misch and Josef Koenig have been analyzed. The first developed hermeneutical logics, which is based on identification the notions ‘life’ and ‘articulation’ ). Three aspects –life as logical category, life as hermeneutical category, and the discoursive forms of self-representation of life- extracted from Misch’s theory seem to be relevant for further development of hermeneutics. Koenig carries forward this research program, but focuses on the linguistic structures of human perception experience and drafts a kind of analytical hermeneutics. The remarkable part of both conceptions is that they pose it logical heterogenity of theoretical and practical discourses. These differences are relevant for rethinking of such epistemological phenomenon, such as ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. According to these positions, hermeneutics can be a homogenous theory of interpretation or understanding, but on the contrary the different logical areas of hermeneutics must be constituted. Thus, hermeneutics can be interpreted as an alternative to the traditional, i.e., epistemological approach, to the theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and to analytical philosophy of language on the other.