Edward Swiderski

I attempt to clarify the connection between two late texts by V.S. Solov''ëv: Justification of the Good and Theoretical Philosophy. Solov''ëv drew attention to the intrinsic connection between moral and intellectual virtues. Theoretical Philosophy is the initial -- unfinished -- sketch of the dynamism of mind seeking truth as a good. I sketch several parallels and analogies between the doctrine of moral experience set out in Justification and the account of the intellect''s dynamism based on immediate certitude set out in Theoretical Philosophy. Solov''ëv can thus be considered as a virtue epistemologist in the current meaning given to this description. I conclude by suggesting that Solov''ëv''s position on these questions does not easily cohere with the impersonalism he appears to defend in Theoretical Philosophy.

Brzozowski’s ‘philosophy of labour’—to which he devoted a number of writings starting in 1902—presents problems of interpretation. A conceptual approach to his conception shows it to be a sometimes uneasy mix of realist and anti-realist notions. Brzozowski appears to have thought that labour is not first of all about the things it supposedly transforms, but rather about itself. I suggest that Brzozowski can be read in the spirit of Nelson Goodman’s nominalist constructionalism (“worldmaking”). On this account, labour in Brzozowski’s idiom turns out to be the constitution of forms of symbolizing sufficient unto themselves and the needs they satisfy. However, that Brzozowski was not entirely consistent in the views I impute to him—he forever sought for some ‘external’ measure of the rightness of labour/symbolizing—can be explained at least in part by his ‘humanism’, that is, his commitment to the task he assigns humankind, that of creating the one meaningful world attesting to virtually unrestricted human power

With the dismantling of Marxist-Leninist ideology, fresh inspiration has been discernible in recent Soviet philosophy. This article argues that a major area of concern is the nature of the human being, a theme formerly dominated by the "social" conceptions inscribed into official historical materialism. Soviet philosophers are examining such categories as culture, spirit, consciousness, and personality with an eye to their common characteristics. For many, the latter is grounded in the nature of the person, the specificity of which lies in a morally qualified unity of action, sentiment, and reason. The author brings together evidence for this thesis and discusses the arguments of the Soviet philosophers with an eye to their conceptual resources and models.

In the summer of 1997 one could scarcely enter a bookstore in Beijing without encountering Wang Xiaobo's pensive and defiant look on the cover of dozens of books displayed at the entrance. Wang had suddenly died in the spring of that year at the age of forty-five. Born in Beijing in 1952 to a family of intellectuals, he remained attached to China's capital despite periods of separation, such as during the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to Yunnan to "learn from the peasants" and taught in a "people-run-school" in Shandong, and also during the 1980s, when he studied in the United States . Wang always returned to Beijing, in the late 1970s to study economy and business at the People's University and in the late 1980s to teach there. After retiring in 1993, he devoted his time to writing: poetry, novels, essays, non-fiction, and a movie script

The author examines, historically and theoretically, issues related to the state and current tendencies of post-Soviet Russian philosophy. The accent falls on the meta-philosophical question, what is philosophy?, or as the Russians often say, what is philosophizing?. In the Russian case, this question has presently to be handled in a cultural context ridden with a sense of discontinuity following the Soviet collapse. The author sketches some concepts intended to shed light on the nature of the relation between a philosophical culture and the wider socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. The model is applied to the case of post-Soviet philosophy in order to see if and to what extent the logic of Soviet philosophizing and its place in the Soviet socio-cultural order has affected current philosophical tendencies in Russia, above all at the meta-philosophical level. The author concludes with a summary and commentary of the views of A.S. Akhiezer.

Late in life, Józef Maria Bocheński set out to examine the age-old preoccupation with the question “how to live as well and as long as possible?” A traditional answer has been, “live wisely.” In his Handbook of Worldly Wisdom (2020), Bocheński analyzes this answer arguing that, conceptually, living wisely is distinct from obeying moral commandments, prescribing ethical rules, and recognizing authority (e.g., piety, free submission to divine authority). He claims that ethics consists solely in what moral philosophers label as “metaethics” — a theoretical discipline interested in the conceptual status of moral discourse qua discourse. However, Bocheński remains silent about a substantive ethics — that is, how a life led one way or another subscribes to some guiding value-set. As regards wisdom, therefore, the consequence of this position is that Bocheński’s account is ethically neutral. I argue that such a position entails a tension and dichotomy between, on the one hand, prudential rationality concerned with getting on in the moment — that is, wisdom — and, on the other hand, unconditional moral commandments. For his part, Bocheński does not recommend living according to wisdom’s precepts as he analyses them; his own path through life, he tells us, has been a commitment to Christian values, piety abetted by observance of moral commandments, a perspective that, I submit, is not ethically neutral: on the contrary, it entails thick, substantive value-choice. Bocheński’s avowal suggests a second dichotomy and tension, that between the worldly conduct of life, with moderate acknowledgment of moral principles, and an extra-worldly perspective (the “folly of the Cross”). Bocheński does not attempt to resolve either dichotomy, to seek a possible point of their convergence and integration, for instance by inquiring into moral psychology (i.e., the construction of self, the nature of the will, etc.). I believe that this set of views stems from conclusions Bocheński reached in advance of producing the Handbook that bear on, first, how philosophy should be conducted — as logical analysis hostile to grandiloquent speculation and synthesis (“worldviews”); and second, his utter dismissal as nefarious of anthropocentric views. Indeed, Bocheński asserts, without a blush, that almost everything “we” have come to believe about ourselves is superstition writ large. I trace what I consider to be difficulties with Bocheński’s account of wisdom — in relation to his take on morality, (meta-)ethics, and piety — to these idiosyncratic views.

The focus of this chapter is the rise of investigations in philosophical aesthetics in the mid-1950s and continuing through to the mid-1960s. This salient issue had to do with the foundations of philosophical aesthetics in the context of the Marxist-Leninist worldview. That this became an issue was due in large part to the appearance, in 1956, of the first Russian translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s emphasis in these writings on the self-constituting, transformative potential of labor suggested possibilities for an aesthetic that did not sit comfortably with the dogmatic principles of dialectical and historical materialism. In effect, the foundational question for a Soviet aesthetics went to the heart of Marxism-Leninism: could young Marx’s anthropocentrism be reconciled with the established Soviet doctrine beholden to, on the one hand, Engels’ metaphysics of “matter-in-motion” and, on the other hand, Lenin’s copy theory of knowledge? Among the aestheticians, the issue surfaced in a debate about the nature of beauty: is beauty relative to man or is it an objectively cognizable material property? To the degree that the parties to this debate addressed the underlying issue, they tended to remain ambivalent toward the result that neither side—those favoring creative expression versus the defenders of objective beauty—simply conceded nor rejected the views of the other. As I argue, a systematic philosophical aesthetics within the scope of Soviet philosophy never saw the light of day. By the mid-1960s, research was ramifying into a variety of adjacent considerations, for example, value theory, theories of culture and cultural artifacts, the history of aesthetic categories, the social and pedagogical functions of art, art and morality in relation to the “socialist way of life,” art in the era of the “scientific-technological revolution,” and so on—of which only some recalled the spirit, rarely the letter, of the initial “aesthetics” discussion.

0. 1. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEMATIC This study is devoted to an examination of a concept of crucial significance for Soviet aesthetics - the concept of the aesthetic (esteticeskoe). Soviet aestheticians have for some time already been trying to design a concept of the aesthetic that would satisfy, on the one hand, the requirements of aesthe tic phenomena, and, on the other hand, the principles of the Marxist-Leninist world view. The first part of this work shows how the concept of the aesthetic has been and continues to be problematic for Soviet aestheticians. This task is carried out by dwelling, first of all, on the controversies among Soviet aesthe ticians concerning meta-aesthetic issues, viz, the nature and scope of aesthetics as well as its place among other philosophical and non-philosophical disci plines. A particularly clear view of the problems that have traditionally pre occupied Soviet aestheticians is provided by an examination of what they standardly call the 'method of aesthetics', where 'method' is understood in the sense of an explanatory framework rather than in the strict logico-scien tific sense of the term. This discussion will provide the occasion to pass in review the main periods of Soviet aesthetics and the characteristic aspects of each. The chapter on the sources of contemporary Marxist-Leninist aesthetics brings into relief the lack of a homogeneous tradition in the question of the nature of the aesthetic and other related problems.