2023 Vol. 42. №4

The archive of Gustav Shpet contains scattered preparatory materials for his “Lectures on the Theory of Cognition” and his major philosophical work History as a Problem of Logic. Some of these handwritten rough notes are devoted to Kant, indeed some of them have already seen the light of day in the “Kant­ian Journal” (2022, № 3). The notes published below continue to acquaint the reader with Shpet’s creative laboratory. His method of work with the concepts and ideas is instructive in that it enables us to raise questions about the meaning of “positive critique”, its difference from Kant’s own “critical method” and why contemporary historical-philosophical attempts to actualise Kant’s concept of critique have more to do with Shpet’s rather than Kant’s methodology. Of particular relevance today is the authors’ attempt to immerse the Kantian understanding of critique in the context of Shpet’s phenomenologically oriented hermeneutic methodology.

The letters of S. I. Hessen and I. I. Lapshin, two Russian Neo-Kantian philosophers, were written in the early post-war years. These letters bear witness to the later period in the life and work of their authors, a period of hardship, tragic losses and hopes. Both philosophers were deeply embedded in the intellectual landscape of Russian emigration. They were also known and valued by their peers in the countries that gave them refuge, Poland and Czechoslovakia, where they not only published their works, but also taught young scholars. Hessen, being considerably younger than Lapshin, continued teaching and actively publishing after the war, including outside Poland. Lapshin in Czechoslovakia was less in demand, but continued preparing his works for publication. The reflections of the two authors shed light on the idea content of their later works, which is particularly valuable in reconstructing the conception of the texts which were not completed at the time of their death and have survived only in the shape of plans and rough notes. It is also interesting that in their letters Hessen and especially Lapshin expound the Kantian element of their philosophical views as well as sharing their impressions of the development of philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century.