Russian religious aesthetics

Russian philosophy includes a variety of philosophical movements. Authors who developed them are listed below sorted by movement.

While most authors listed below are primarily philosophers, also included here are some Russian fiction writers, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who are also known as philosophers.

Russian philosophy as a separate entity started its development in the 19th century, defined initially by the opposition of Westernizers, advocating Russia's following the Western political and economical models, and Slavophiles, insisting on developing Russia as a unique civilization. The latter group included Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev, the early founders of eurasianism. The discussion of Russia's place in the world has since become the most characteristic feature of Russian philosophy.

In its further development, Russian philosophy was also marked by deep connection to literature and interest in creativity, society, politics and nationalism; cosmos and religion were other notable subjects.

Notable philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries include Vladimir Solovyev, Vasily Rozanov, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Berdyaev, Pitirim Sorokin and Vladimir Vernadsky.

Since the early 1920s to late 1980s Russian philosophy was dominated by Marxism presented as dogma and not grounds for discussion. Stalin's purges, culminating in 1937, delivered a deadly blow to the development of philosophy.

A handful of dissident philosophers survived through the Soviet period, among them Aleksei Losev. Stalin's death in 1953 gave way for new schools of thought to spring up, among them Moscow Logic Circle, and Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School.

Philosophy in Ukraine

Because it was adopted from other cultures to address certain pressing political or religious needs, philosophy in Ukraine has been preoccupied with practical rather than theoretical problems. The political calamities and attendant cultural disruptions in the history of Ukraine account to a large extent for the lack of durable philosophical tradition in Ukraine and for the absence of a distinctively Ukrainian system or worldview. Lacking its own philosophical literature and institutions, Ukrainian culture could be considered to have been incomplete during some periods of its development. At such times writers and poets rather than philosophers were the propagators of philosophical ideas and theories among the Ukrainian public.

Modern period. During the second half of the 18th century the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, Chernihiv College, Pereiaslav College, and Kharkiv College were gradually reduced to mere seminaries. At the beginning of the 1760s the Kyiv metropolitan ordered philosophy at the academy to be taught according to C. Baumeister's texts based on C. Wolff's system, and thus discouraged any individual originality and intellectual independence.

Ukraine's loss of the last vestiges of political autonomy under Catherine II and its swift cultural decline account for the weak impression that the Enlightenment made on Ukrainian thought. Without royal encouragement or interest and without vigorous institutions of higher learning independent of church control, the Enlightenment could not grow into a full-fledged movement. It is represented by a few individual thinkers, such as Yakiv Kozelsky, Petro Lodii, Ivan Rizhsky, and Johann Baptist Schad, and propagandists, such as Vasyl Karazyn, Hryhorii Vynsky. A conservative form of Enlightenment based on G. Leibniz's and C. Wolff's ideas was propagated by the higher schools; the more radical form articulated by Voltaire, J.-J. Rousseau, D. Diderot, C.-A. Helvétius, P.-H. Holbach, and Montesquieu was cultivated and propagated by small circles of educated nobles.

In its practical (moral and social) consequences the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda is very close to the teachings of the Philosophes, although it has no direct tie with the Enlightenment. It is rooted not in the new natural sciences, but in the humanist tradition going back to the ancient philosophers and in Christian Neoplatonism. In his writings Skovoroda denounced the injustice and exploitation he observed around him, and in practice he renounced this society by turning down a career in the church. His ideal society, which can be realized only by individual moral rebirth, is based on the fulfillment of each member's inner nature. In this context equality is the full (hence equal) realization by all individuals of their unequal potentialities.

A number of Ukrainians played an important role in the growth of mysticism in the 18th-century Russian Empire. This trend of thought paved the way for the Romantic worldview and German idealism.

The development of Ukrainian culture, particularly literature and art, in the 19th century was influenced decisively by German romanticism. The Romantic outlook attained its fullest philosophical expression in the German idealists—J. Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and G. Hegel—and it was those thinkers who had a determining influence on philosophical thought in Ukraine during the first half of the 19th century.

The Christian Romantic ideology of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood is the finest example of a creative response by young Ukrainian intellectuals to new ideas from the West. As expressed in the Knyhy bytiia ukraïns’koho narodu (The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People), their theory was a mixture of Enlightenment political ideals (equality, democracy, parliamentarism), pietist sentiment, and Romantic notions of historical providentialism and national messianism. A religiously colored faith in Ukraine's mission to unite the Slavs in a federation of free national republics inspired the writings of the leading Ukrainian writers of the mid-century and stimulated the growth of national consciousness.

Mykhailo Drahomanov developed his political and social theory in a positivist framework. The sociologist Maksym Kovalevsky was influenced strongly by A. Comte, while Bohdan Kistiakovsky worked out a neo-Kantian foundation for the social sciences. Fedir Zelenohorsky of Kharkiv University emphasized the importance of the inductive method without denying the role of deduction and imagination in scientific knowledge. Oleksander Potebnia's and Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky's philosophy of language was based on associationist psychology.

After the First World War philosophy developed very differently in Western Ukraine under Polish rule, in Soviet Ukraine under the stifling restrictions of official ideology, and among Ukrainian émigrés. Denied their own university by the Polish authorities, Galicia's Ukrainians were unable to compete with the Poles in the quality of philosophical education and writing. Some philosophy was taught at the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University (eg, by Stepan Balei) and at the Greek Catholic Theological Academy by Rev Yosyf Slipy (scholasticism), Mykola Konrad (ancient philosophy), and Havryil Kostelnyk (epistemology). The Western Ukrainian and émigré proponents of different political ideologies, such as conservatism, integral nationalism, socialism, and Marxism, discussed, with varying sophistication and objectivity, the philosophical grounds of their outlook.