Leonid Kornilaev

This report presents the features of the organisation and the main ideas of the international scientific conference “‘No Right of Sedition’. Kant and the Problem of Revolution in the 18th—21st Century Philosophy.” The conference was held at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Kaliningrad on November 9—10, 2017 and was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The event was organised by the Academia Kantiana — a research unit on comparative studies on Russian and Western philosophy at the IKBFU’s Institute for the Humanities. The reports presented at the conference focused on the analysis of the phenomenon of revolution from Kant to the present day as well as the conceptions of revolution that appeared around the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The report summarises all the presentations and discussions that took place at the confe­rence in accordance with the thematic clusters. The conference confirmed that Kant’s ideas on the state and the revolution are still relevant today.

The period between the late 1910s and early 1920s saw the emergence of onto-epistemological philosophical projects in Russia that was determined by criticism and attempts to overcome the domination of epistemology in philosophy which was the result of the intensive development of Neo-Kantianism and the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology. Attempts to turn towards ontology were made both by Russian religious philosophers and by Russian Neo-Kantians. I look at the little-studied philosophical projects of the Russian Neo-Kantians Lev Salagov and Nikolai Boldyrev. Their philosophical concepts share the tendency to transpose epistemological problems to ontology, and to identify and bring closer together epistemology and ontology. Russian philosophers ontologise the theory of cognition through the analysis of subjectivity, the complete elimination of psychological motives and the separation of transcendentalism from transcendentism. These principles enable Salagov to ground a three-part structure of cognition and to assert that the main task of genuine epistemology is exclusively the study of the cognitive relationship, committing to consciousness. They enable Boldyrev, proceeding from the separation of reflection and sensibility, to build a doctrine on the self-unfolding of being. Similar tendencies — a turn towards ontology — were observed in the same period in West European philosophy, including German Neo-Kantianism. However, the concepts of Russian Neo-Kantians, which imply a new orientation towards ontology, are fairly independent, and not only on account of the original interpretation of Kantian critical philosophy and Neo-Kantian epistemology, but also on account of internal discussion with the Russian philosophers belonging to other movements. The analysis of the onto-epistemological projects of Russian Neo-Kantians makes important additions to the picture of the reception of Neo-Kantianism in Russia.

Along with competing legal concepts of positivism and gnoseologism in the second half of the 19th century, a direction of legal psychology was formed, within which the psychological theory of law by the Russian and Polish lawyer L.I. Petrazhitsky takes a prominent place. L.I. Petrazhitsky's legal theory interprets the law as a mental phenomenon in a person's mind. The mental life forms the internal and external legal behavior. Studying the law becomes possible only by analyzing the subject's particular kind of emotional life - legal experience. Our focus on the individual's emotional world gives us reason to think of the theory as individualistic, i.e., close to the subject's mental life. At the same time, the Russian lawyer's psychological doctrine also gains explanatory potential for scrutinizing social life. It contains ideas that reveal such mechanisms of social functioning as the affirmation of the ideal of love as the ultimate goal of law-making, the priority of unofficial law in the life of society, and a specific interpretation of public and private law. The system of legal emotions is carried out on the social niveau and establishes such values as love and social order. The article reconstructs the main provisions of Petrazhitsky's psychological theory of law from the point of view of the interaction of its individual and social sides. The social potential of the Russian lawyer's theory appears capable of supplementing and explaining the ideas of socialism and sobornost discussed widely at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Petrazhitsky's individualistic doctrine appears as a flexible concept, capable of fitting organically into various philosophical and sociological contexts.