Does a “russian philosophy” exist? The boundaries and nature of a question

Abstract

The issue of the existence of a peculiarly “Russian” philosophy has long been the object of many debates, which soon led to very different and often opposite conclusions. The question is always the same: Is there an original contribution that Russian authors made to philosophy, in the same way as with literature, arts, and sciences? What happened to Greek/Western philosophy when cultivated in “Russian soil”? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to first carry out a brief examination of the never-obvious issue of “what being a philosopher means”, i.e. of what generally distinguishes an intellectual who claims to be a “philosopher” from other kinds of intellectuals or scholars. After this short but necessary premise, this article will try to sum up some of the classic and modern definitions of Russian philosophy (from Chaadaev to Evlampiev) and conclude by proposing a personal idea about an overarching frame of Russian philosophical thought. In my opinion, the latter mostly originates from a peculiar reception in Russia of Platonism, Idealism and Marxism that ultimately transformed those views, especially during the Silver Age, into a sort of “integral gnoseology”, which connects “logos” and “life” in a specifically dialectical way that can be described, pour cause, as “Russian”. This “integral gnoseology” ultimately conjoins science and humanism in an original way and is capable of opening up to discreet phenomena and to multiple levels of knowledge.