Filatov, Vladimir P. Nikolai Onufrievich Losskii (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 551 Filatov, Vladimir P. (ed.). Nikolai Onufrievich Losskii. Filosofiia Rossii pervoi poloviny XX veka. Rosspen, Moscow, 2016. 397 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Bibliography. R396.00. This is a collection of nineteen articles, all in Russian, on the life and thought of the prominent twentieth-century Russian philosopher, Nikolai Onufrievich Losskii. The volume, edited by Vladimir Filatov, presents the reader with an analysis of Losskii’s thought — his intuitivism, his personalism, his relation to phenomenology, his narrative of the history of Russian philosophy, and so on. Losskii is also compared to other Russian philosophers (Shpet, Frank) and his legacy in other countries (Poland, Slovakia) is examined. In the preface, Filatov explains, among other things, why such a study of Losskii’s thought is relevant forcontemporaryphilosophy.Heemphasizes—andquiterightlyso—Losskii’s contribution to ontological gnoseology as developed in his first great work, The Foundation of Intuitivism (1906), which he characterizes as a ‘visiting card’ of Losskii’s entire system. His criticism of Neo-Kantian transcendental idealism and constructivism, as well as his defence of ontological realism, Filatov says, remain especially relevant to current disputes on this subject. The collection is divided into two parts, the first of which is entitled ‘Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics’. It opens with an essay by Piama Gaidenko, in which she provides a précis of Losskii’s system, with its intuitivism, its unitotalism, its concrete ideal-realism, its monadologism or theory of substantival agents, its theory of freewill, its theory of the genesis of the world, of the formation of matter, and so on. This is followed by two contributions on intuitivism. The first, by Frances Nethercott, focuses on Losskii’s intuitivism, Sergei Povarnin’s criticism of it and Berdyaev’s (mostly) positive reception of it. The second, by Albert Novikov, is entitled ‘The Five Hypostases of Russian Intuitivism (On the “Propaedeutic” of N. Losskii’s Gnoseology)’. This title is somewhat misleading as the reader might expect a discussion of hypostases in the Neo-Platonic sense, whereas in fact, by ‘hypostases’ the author only means ‘semantic constructions […], which were designed to best reveal the essence of his “intuitivism”’ (p. 71). These are followed by essays on phenomenologyrelated themes. Victor Molchanov compares aspects of Losskii’s theory of knowledgewithsimilarideasfromBrentano’stheoryofintentionality,Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s theory of being-in-the-world, whereas Vitaly Lechtzier situates Losskii’s intuitivism in the context of Husserlian phenomenology and claims that the latter had an influence upon the former. Tatiana Shchedrina then compares Losskii’s treatment of the problem of the ‘I’ with that of Gustav Shpet and, in turn, in a brief essay Irina Beshkareva compares Losskii’s philosophy with that of Semen Frank. Anatoly Pushkarsky focuses on the reception of Losskii’s logic by American philosophers, more SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 552 precisely on the reception of Losskii’s Handbuch der Logik (1927) by Clarence Lewis and on that of his brochure Analytic and Synthetic Propositions and Mathematical Logic (1953) by Christopher Blake. Concluding this part of the book is an essay by Elena Serdyukova based on Losskii’s article ‘Space, Time and Einstein’s Theories’ (1953) and letters exchanged between Losskii and Einstein on the nature of space and time. Serdyukova recently retrieved these previously unpublished letters from the Einstein archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Losskii archives at the Institut d’études slaves in Paris. The second part of the book, entitled ‘Personality. Religion. Culture’, begins with an essay by Vasily Vanchugov on Losskii’s History of Russian Philosophy (1951), the initial idea of which, the author surmises, may have been inspired by Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which was first published in 1945. The author suggests that Losskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is so subjective and personal that it might as well have been titled ‘History of Losskii’s Philosophy’ (p. 210). Irina Blauberg then examines Losskii’s treatment of the concept of personhood, and Roman Granin explores his eschatological doctrine of reincarnation. Varvara Popova considers Losskii’s The Character of the Russian People (1957) and discusses how the account of the essential features of the Russian national character proposed therein can be used to analyse the cultural...