Mikhail Minakov

How can constituent power be simultaneously constrained by law and genuinely democratic? This question has haunted constitutional theory since Sieyès distinguished constituent from constituted power. This article argues that political liberalism’s attempts to resolve this paradox generate two structural aporias. First, anti-foundationalist approaches to constituent power inevitably produce an invisible foundation: normative standards like “the most reasonable” operate as quasi-transcendental constraints even while disclaiming metaphysical commitments. Second, locating sovereignty in a transgenerational people creates an absent sovereign: ultimate democratic authority resides in an entity accessible only through juridical interpretation, never directly present to living citizens. Through critical engagement with Alessandro Ferrara’s Sovereignty across Generations (2023) and recent scholarship on intergenerational constitutionalism, I demonstrate that these aporias are not contingent flaws in particular theories but constitutive features of political liberalism’s broader project. Drawing on Lefort’s concept of democracy’s “empty place of power” and Arendt’s notion of natality, I argue that constitutional democracy depends on sustaining permanent tensions between popular sovereignty and normative constraint, between democratic self-governance and inherited commitments. Political liberalism’s future lies in embracing rather than eliminating its internal contradictions, accepting that sovereignty must remain contested if freedom is to endure without metaphysical foundations.

Man kann die postsowjetische Periode 1989–2022 bereits heute als eine eigenständige, ja sogar prägende Epoche der modernen Weltgeschichte betrachten. Sie resultierte aus dem spektakulären Ende des Sowjetsystems und endete mit der Großinvasion Russlands in der Ukraine. Diese gut dreißigjährige Ära eröffnete den Völkern Osteuropas und Nordeurasiens eine einzigartige Möglichkeit, Freiheitsformen selbst zu gestalten und eigene schöpferischen Potentiale zu erproben. Eine weitere Besonderheit der postsowjetischen Epoche in ihrem Raum war, dass sie – im Gegensatz zur Zeit der Russischen Revolution und des Bürgerkriegs 1917–1924 – nur eine vergleichsweise geringe Zahl an Toten forderte. Stattdessen unternahmen die Bürger der UdSSR-Nachfolgestaaten den Versuch, freie Politik und Wirtschaft zu etablieren sowie kollektive Emanzipation und persönliche Freiheit zu erlangen. Obwohl diese Versuche in den meisten Fällen scheiterten, war die politische Kreativität der postsowjetischen Menschen – ob nun bezüglich ihrer demokratischen Errungenschaften oder autokratischen Brüche – faszinierend. Eine unvoreingenommene Analyse dieser politischen Kreativität trägt dazu bei, angemessene Lehren aus der postsowjetischen Periode zu ziehen. Es ist für die neuen osteuropäischen und nordeurasischen Gesellschaften essentiell, dem Teufelskreis aus Tragödie und Zerstörung entgegenzuwirken sowie künftig eine nachhaltige Entwicklung zu gewährleisten.

The East European nations’ common past in the Soviet Union connects them in terms of both their political histories and the evolution of their philosophical thought. The USSR’s dissolution created new opportunities, domestic and international, in science, politics, and business. De-Sovietization meant for philosophy that it lost its former significance as a political-ideological tool of the authorities, and its previous role in society. Philosophers of the former Soviet bloc now found themselves able to communicate with colleagues around the world. This volume’s chapters analyze the renewal of the philosophical enterprise over the last thirty to forty years, in Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Among its authors are Yevgeniy Abdullaev, Viktoras Bakhmetjevas, Alexandru Cosmescu, Maija Kule, Denys Kiryukhin, Giorgi Khuroshvili, Mikhail Maiatsky, Tatyana Shchittsova, and Mikhail Minakov. "This book is a long-needed assessment of the transformations of philosophy after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a wide range of possibilities opened up for philosophical thinking." —Daniela Steila, University of Turin "This book offers an excellent handle with which to grasp the inherent difficulty of reconciling states, civil societies, and academic knowledge in fraught national settings." —Diana Pinto, Historian "Nothing can help us more incisively than this book to grasp how thinking, though imperceptible and immaterial, can be put and kept in chains or can suddenly break free from chains." —Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome Tor Vergata "The book offers new and original cartography of the post-Soviet intellectual space and its development." —Nikolaj Plotnikov, Ruhr-University Bochum "But what happened to philosophy in Soviet hands when the Soviet Union faded away? The answer is in this volume." —Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia "The book is a must-read not only for those who are interested in a deep understanding of post-Soviet philosophy, its history, and its place in the world but also for those who want to truly explore the inner side of post-Soviet being and consciousness." —Julie Reshe, University College Cork and University College Dublin "It is this overview of the new critical potentials in the post-Communist East that makes the book an obligatory reading for all who care about our common destiny." —Slavoj Žižek, University of London/University of Ljubljana.

The post-Soviet period (1989–2022) was, in its own way, an unprecedented era in human history. Its uniqueness lied not only in the fact that the USSR’s dissolution had opened opportunities for the people and nations of Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia to experience freedom and test their creative powers, but also in the fact that these opportunities did not extract a price comparable to the cost in human lives and suffering during the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917–24. The post-Soviet Human attempted to establish free politics and economy, as well as to gain collective emancipation and personal freedom during this era. Even though these attempts failed in most cases, the post-Soviet Human’s political creativity—with its democratic and autocratic achievements—was an intriguing phenomenon worth deeper study and understanding. Without learning the lessons of post-Soviet history, the East European and north Eurasian peoples are doomed to perpetually repeat its vicious cycles of tragedy and destruction.

Kantian philosophy, despite its historical origins in the eighteenth century, continues to inspire modern philosophers and stimulate the research of historians of philosophy. This holds true for Ukraine, where, over the past four decades, Kantian studies have become a dynamic area of philosophical inquiry. In this article, the author traces the trajectory of these studies’ advancement, outlining their inception in the 1970s–1980s, their liberation from ideological constraints in the 1990s, their culmination in the initial decade of the twenty-first century, and their ongoing evolution in the face of the numerous challenges encountered by Ukrainian scholars in recent years. Additionally, this paper refers to the translation of Kant’s works into Ukrainian and the debates they sparked among the members of the Kant Society of Ukraine.

The author examines the epistemological project of analytic philosophy, which went through stages of transformation marked by the influence of Frege and Russell. The article emphasizes the main points of the first stage of analytic philosophy, during which the sphere of experience merged with language. The next stage defines a new subject - Wittgenstein's "language subject". According to the author, this subject of speech makes decisions about the sense or absurdity of sentences based on logical form and belongs to the transcendental subject of speech in general. But in the end, the epistemological project of analytic philosophy moved to new directions in which questions about experience lost their relevance.

Kyiv-Mohyla Seminar on the History of Philosophy was established by the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies in 2003. In this yearly seminar, the Department’s members as well as the historians of philosophy from other academic institutions regularly take part. Since 2003, 16 meetings of the seminar took place. They were focused on such topics as “Historiography of Philosophy in Ukraine: Current State and Perspectives”, “Actual Problems of the Source Studies in the Historiography of Philosophy”, “The Problem of Text Interpretation in the Historiography of Philosophy”, “Dmytro Chyzhevskyi as a Historian of Philosophy”, “Historiography of Philosophy in Ukraine: Current State and Perspectives”, “The Problem of Method in the Historiography of Philosophy”, “Oleksii Losiev: Personality and Heritage ”, “Methodology of the Historiography of Philosophy: Actual Strategies”, “Wilhelm Windelband as a Philosopher and Historian of Philosophy ”, “Hegel’s Heritage in the Mirror of Interpretations”, “The Studies on the History of Philosophy: New Generation”, “Kant’s Criticism from the perspective of Wolf’s dogmatism”, “The Reception of Indian Philosophy in Ukraine: 1840s–1930s”, “Did Kant Answer the Question on What a Man Is?”. The proceedings of the early three meetings were published in a special volume. The current issue of “NaUKMA Research Papers in Philosophy and Religious Studies” contains the proceedings of the sixteenth meeting of Kyiv-Mohyla Seminar on the History of Philosophy, which took place at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on February 1, 2017. The main speaker was Dr. Taras Lyuty, while the co-speakers included Dr. Mykhailo Minakov and Dr. Vakhtang Kebuladze. The meeting was conducted by Prof. Vadym Menzhulin. The audio recording of the meeting was deciphered by a PhD-student Taras Fostiak.

The author argues that Quine’s criticism of Kantian analytical/synthetic distinction, as well as transcendentalist reductionism, is not entirely adequate. Furthermore, the author states that Kant’s and Quine’s theories of experience and cognition (transcendentalist and holistic) are based on a common dogma, the one of consistency. Taking into account their uncritical ac-ceptance of experience as a system that is able to adjust new and old elements to each other, both philosophers have much more in common than Quine and his followers might have ex- pected.