Ontologism in Semyon Frank

Abstract

Semyon Frank (1877–1950) opposed the Neo-Kantian School and admitted the real existence of the objects of cognition. He treated ontologism as essential to the entire movement of Russian religious philosophy. For Frank, one can only know about something thanks to the absolute, which exists prior to the knowing subject. Ontologism, affirming the priority of being over cognition, has a great significance not only for metaphysics and epistemology, but also for the philosophy of religion. In particular, Frank taught that the most privileged mode of cognition of God is intuition, an immediate experience of God or faith (the so-called living knowledge). Intuition is at the heart of the ontological proof, which can be found in St. Anselm, Descartes, and Frank himself. Frank dedicated a number of articles to this topic: “K istorii ontologicheskogo dokazatel’stva” (“On the History of the Ontological Proof,” 1915), “Ontologicheskoe dokazatel’stvo bytiya Boga” (“Ontological Proof of the Existence of God,” 1930), as well as texts recently discovered at the Bakhmeteff Archive, including “Dokazatel’stvo bytiya Boga” (“Proof of the Existence of God”). In this way, Russian ontologism leads to a new interpretation of the traditional ontological proof, one which acknowledges the existence of God, not on the basis of arguments resting on His definition, but on the basis of the intuitive recognition of His being.