Ondrej Marchevsky

The paper focuses on the mutual interaction as well as the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the formation of the Enlightenment in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great. It focuses on the relationship between the work of Adam Smith and Semyon Efimovich Desnitskii, who, thanks to Desnitskii’s studies at the University of Glasgow, got to know each other as teacher and student. The central point of their interaction is the issues of the philosophy of history based on natural-law assumptions and focus on understanding the formation of history, culture, citizenship, and social transformations through morality and law. The paper examines Desnitskii’s ideas on the stages of human coexistence in which Smith’s concept is projected. The paper is not only an attempt to compare these concepts, but it also characterizes Desnitskii’s interest in adapting the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to Russian reality and needs and using them in the environment of the advancing feudal em...

The paper enters contemporary discourse concerning the examination of history of Russian philosophy, which initiates a new reading of the Russian thinkers’ works. These contemporary examinations problematize the phenomenon of so called intellectual doubles as well. The contribution proceeds from the definition of these issues which was published in journal Problems of Philosophy (Voprosy filosofii) by M. A. Maslin in 2013. In this work, Maslin mentions A. I. Herzen among the examples of intellectual doubles phenomenon, who is one of the founders of the Russian Narodism. Following from this basis, the contribution shifts an attention toward issues of intellectual doubles in the context of the Russian Narodism. The work represents an endeavour to deepen the existing problematization of this phenomenon on the basis of examination the N. K. Mikhailovsky’s creative legacy. There can be found two faces in works of this Narodnik thinker. The first one can be figuratively designed as a Pete...

The occasion of the 100th anniversary of I. Kant’s death was a colossal impulse for many researchers of Immanuel Kant’s legacy. One of the goals of the paper is to introduce one of the less known anniversary critical texts, which appeared in the Russian intellectual milieu. It attempts to disrupt the usual approach regarding the interpretation of Bely’s comprehension of Kant’s legacy, i.e., Kant as a skeleton of philosophy or a police officer of thinking. The paper points to a more systematically conceived scale of Bely’s reflections of Kant. From Bely’s point of view, Kant is the author of firm grounds for the shaping of thought. On the unstable background of philosophy, which during the historical development of thought succumbed to erosion, it is Kant’s philosophy that serves as the stabilizing base. Bely tries to highlight that Kant’s epistemology forms distinctively outlined the foundations of a knowledge of the world and philosophical comprehension not only of history but also...

The Enlightenment represents a frequently reflected and, at the same time, also updated tradition. The Enlightenment ideas have become a theoretical-methodological base for thinking as such by its connection to a social or social-political praxis, what can be seen even in the contemporary confrontation with the Enlightenment legacy. The paper analyses the Enlightenment as a unique historical phenomenon – it deals with its explicit as well as its practical-political features – within the Russian milieu. In the basic outline, the paper presents a critical survey of the selected bibliographical sources. It primarily focuses on a historical-philosophical problematics and identification of three phases which can be found within a genesis of the Enlightenment thinking in Russia. The second part of the paper offers the characteristics of distinctive intellectual environments participating in a forming of the Enlightenment tradition in Russian thinking, and overlapping into actual political...

Work of Immanuel Kant is subject matter of investigation not only in modern Slovak history. Already in the past, it had a great influence on intellectual development of Slovak region within The Kingdom of Hungary. One of the attentive and critical readers of Kant's works was Matej Szlavik, a professor of Evangelical College in Presov. The study analyses Szlavik’s interpretation of Kant's works and it particularly focuses on analysis of Szlavik’s evaluations of Kant's practical and moral philosophy.

The paper can be seen as a response to the 1994 challenge formulated by A.I. Abramov in his work Kant in Russian Spiritual-Academic Philosophy, where he emphasizes the need to examine reflections on Immanuel Kant’s legacy in var­ious Russian academic and intellectual environments. This study thus joins the existing ones that have covered the dominant tendencies of Russian Kantian studies in such important environments as, for example, academies or journals as Kant Studien, Problems of Philosophy and Psychology and their editorial boards. The paper focuses on one of the journal environments – Problems of Phi­losophy – and it responds to the status quo, i.e., to the fact that this important and still living creative environment has not been the subject of a systematic review in the context of the study of Kant’s creative legacy. The paper is not an overview or chronological summary of works but it uses the approach of subject-thematic analysis to reveal the main pillars of the interes...

The paper analyzes Slovakian and Czech studies of the sociological a philosophical views of such Russian narodniks as P.L. Lavrov from a historic point of view and in their rela­tion to some contemporary interpretations. The first part of the paper provides an over­view of Czech and Slovakian works on narodism in Russia. In the second part of the pa­per, the author discusses P.L. Lavrov as an outstanding representative of narodism, whose ideas have not received sufficient attention in the Czech and Slovakian scholarship. The author shows that the study and the street as two places in which Lavrov’s thought devel­oped were two points in the social space within which the former represented theory and the latter represented practice. Lavrov’s discourse of the study is built on objectivity and scientific values, whereas his discourse of the street is characterized by radicalism and in­tolerance to different opinions. This duality in Lavrov’s perspective reflects the duality of his chara...