Пиама Гайденко и философы-шестидесятники

Abstract

This article is an essay on the life and work of Piama P. Gaidenko. I argue that Gaidenko belonged to the informal community of philosophers of the Sixties who sought to bring about a radical renewal of Soviet philosophy. However, unlike most of them, ever since her post-graduate years she had been a religious philosopher. Her works The Tragedy of Aestheticism, The Evolution of the Concept of Science and Breakthrough to the Transcendent are the most expressive evidence of this. They defend a moral philosophy based on faith and opposed to the Hegelian apology of speculative reason. Gaidenko insists that philosophically meaningful faith is compatible with scientific rationality. A strictly rational account of the philosopher’s mission and of the relationship of philosophy with art, religion, and science, she argues, ought to be an indispensable component of a moral philosophy based on faith. In the paper I pay special attention (as did Gaidenko herself) to the problem of making the philosophical heritage relevant and the concept of existential philosophy in Gaidenko’s work. The essay is supplemented by a review of Gaydenko’s re-published, little-known article “Apocalypticism, Chiliasm and Hellenic Philosophy” (2000). In it I focus mainly on the relation between philosophy and Christianity and the transformation of Utopianism in an era of deepening secularization.