Vivos Voco. Post-war Correspondence between Sergey Hessen and Ivan Lapshin: Year 1946
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 ...
Immanuel Kant in the Conversations and Reflections of Nikolay Strakhov
The place occupied by Kant’s philosophical ideas in the reflections of the Russian philosopher, Nikolay Strakhov, needs further study. The material for a historical-philosophical reconstruction of Strakhov’s reception of Kant’s philosophy is the Russian thinker’s home library catalogue, his correspondence and his own philosophical works. Among Strakhov’s interlocutors were not only philosophers and natural scientists, but also writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Afanasy Fet, who...
Kant als metaphilosophischer Skeptizist?
Throughout history, both philosophers and non-philosophers have doubted that philosophical positions qua philosophical positions are justified and that philosophy is a rational enterprise. Today, such doubts are grouped under the term “Metaphilosophical Skepticism”. Nicholas Rescher, in his book Strife of Systems, includes Kant among the proponents of this kind of skepticism. I want to argue that while Rescher is wrong, Kant has contributed to a new version of such skepticism. In the first step...
Pure and Impure Philosophy in Kant’s Metaphilosophy
Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can...
Tool-Kit for Ethical Analysis of Video Games: Answer to the Challenges of the New Enlightenment
The authors of the idea of a “new Enlightenment”, Ernst von Weizsäcker and Anders Wijkman, in their 2018 report to the Club of Rome analyse the causes of the explosive development of science and technology in the Modern period and come to the conclusion that their triumph and existential threats stem in many ways from the ideals of Enlightenment, so that the future of humankind depends crucially on an ideological rethinking of man’s status in the world. They stress the need to enhance the responsibility...
Kant and the New Enlightenment: On the Balance between Duty and Utilitarian Ends
The relation between Kant’s philosophy and the “philosophy of balance” as it is described in the report Come on! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet, delivered to the Club of Rome in 2018, requires some analysis. The authors of the report consider Kant to be a philosopher of European Enlightenment which laid the foundations of the modern world, but also proved to be the source of global problems. The report characterises the philosophy of the Enlightenment as lop-sided...
Apology of Human Existence vs “Ideal Homicide”: S.L. Frank’s Anthropological Project.
The emergence of S. L. Frank’s philosophy cannot be understood without clarifying his attitude to Immanuel Kant. Following the early representatives of the theory of cognition of his time who undertook to understand Kant in order to go beyond him (W. Windelband) and their warning against turning Kant’s philosophy into a dogma and allowing for diverse interpretations of Kant (P. Natorp), Frank saw Kant not as a critic and “destroyer” of metaphysics, but as a thinker who laid the foundations of a new...
From Kant to Frank: The Ethic of Duty and the Problem of Resistance to Evil in Russian Thought
One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this end I reconstruct the general course of...
On multiple semiotics integrally, aspectively and concretely
Anton Zimmerling’s interpretation of the discursive particle TI1 is an important achievement. The article considers possibilities used by Zimmerling to interpret TI1 as a discursive particle, enclitic, part of speech and semantic sign. In addition, the article discusses its interpretation as a pragmatic marker. The author comments on the interpretations of semiotics by Zimmerling, in particular, the question of primary and secondary semiotic systems. The author presents his own concept of semiotics...
How presuppositions and illocutionary force become components of sense: some implications from the analysis of fictitious names in Frege’s philosophy
Frege's fictitious names possess meaning but lack denotation. Both these names and the sentences containing them are deemed fictitious. Since any proper name can potentially refer to an imaginary entity, it is crucial to consider the speaker's intention. When making a statement, the speaker may refer to the real or the imaginary. In the latter case, the thought cannot be explicitly expressed, and consequently, denotation cannot be reached. In Frege's framework, fictional thoughts hold little significance...
Signs and senses as an epistemological problem
The semiotic problem of the triad “sign – meaning – sense” is discussed as a methodological problem caused by philosophy of external realism and the representational theory of cognition based on it. Reification of linguistic signs, along with the erroneous view of the nature and function of language as a communication tool rather than the mode of existence of humans as living (cognitive) systems, impedes scientific explanation of both language and linguistic signs. As an alternative, the core...
Really: syntactics without semiotics?
I discuss the relation of linguistics and semiotics on the basis of the Old Russian discourse particle TI1 ‘indeed’, ‘verily’, ‘truly’ discovered by Andrej A. Zaliznjak in 1993. Linguistics and semiotics are different research programmes: the first one deals with specific features of language structures, while the second one discusses general characteristics of all sign systems, from a perspective of interpreting most or all of them as secondary respective to natural language. Formal models of language...
Petroleum as a space for non-translation: Hikmet, Negarestani, Parshchikov
In 1927, Nâzım Hikmet composed several poems based on his impressions of his visit to Azerbaijani capital, the city of Baku. They will be included in the collection Song of the Sun-drinkers (1928) and will soon be translated into Russian. The Baku cycle was one of the first attempts at a symbolic representation of petroleum in Russian poetry, in many ways foreshadowing the later poetics of the subject, which will develop on Russian material only in the 2000s. One can look at these poems by Hikmet...
Translation as a journey through possible and impossible worlds
In this paper, translation is examined from the perspective of the semantics of possible worlds. The consequences of this viewpoint are explored, particularly in relation to the metaphor of traveling through possible and impossible worlds in translation practice. Special attention is given to cases where there are disparities between the world of the original text and the world of the translated text. For example, in the case of French subjunctive forms, which are grammatically mandatory in the original...
Conceptual structure of the binary axiological opposition truth — lie
Axiological categories and the concepts they consist of have always been a major area of interest in science. The development of cognitive linguistics has opened new perspectives for the study of axiological events, categories and concepts within them. This article explores the structure of the axiological binary opposition truth-lie, based on the material of the English language. In English, the verbalised concept truth encodes information about both objective truth as well as its subjective perception...
Levels of context: how textual analysis becomes discourse analysis: the case of Internet lifestyle media
Today the so-called problem of discourse should boil down to (1) identifying relevant contextual variables, (2) matching these to specific linguistic categories, and (3) operationalizing the former vis-à-vis the latter. Having posited this, the purpose of the article is twofold. In a more theoretical sense, the purpose is to outline one possible model of context each 'tier' of which is potentially related to certain linguistic categories and linguistic analytical toolkits. The suggested model has...
The semiotic perpetuum mobile in action: OMON, homonyms and antonyms
We address the interaction of various interpretations of lexical items, which leads to a change in the correlation between signifieds and signifiers and the formation of new signs. Addressing the polysemic slogan ‘ОМОН-И-МЫ — АНТОНИМЫ’, we explicate the mechanism of semiotic Perpetuum mobile, that is, the cyclic recursions that allow simultaneous actualization of various interpretations of this utterance. We demonstrate that the analysis of semantic relations in their dynamics requires the introduction...
Semiotic representation of Minsk in Viktor Martinovich’s novel “Mova”
The article aims to reveal the principles of urban space organisation in Viktor Martinovich’s novel “Mova”. Due to the fact that the novel is based on a linguistic problem (the author defines the genre of the novel as a “linguistic thriller”), the representation of the city in the novel is subject to linguistic models and principles. The main of these principles is the isomorphism of the part and the whole. The structural generality of the different levels of the novel and the novel space is based...
Ekaterinburg — Sverdlovsk — Ekaterinburg: the city image in the dynamics of a toponymic text
The article is devoted to reflecting the image of a city in verbal data — topographic names. The author bases the research upon the ideas of the cultural-semiotic approach to city studies, upon the conception of a city as a text and palimpsest and sets the goal of investigating semantic changes in the toponymic text of Ekaterinburg examined in its historical dynamics. The main stages of modification of the Ural city toponymic image are characterized via the metaconcept of chronotopos. As a tool...
On a Recent Attempt to Derive Positive Duties from Kant’s Formula of Universal Law
According to the positive duties objection, it is not possible to derive positive duties from Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL). However, in his recent “Deriving Positive Duties from Kant’s Formula of Universal Law”, Guus Duindam tries to answer this objection. More specifically, Duindam tries to show how both a duty of benevolence and a duty of self-perfection can be derived from the FUL. I critically examine Duindam’s arguments. I maintain that Duindam’s argument for the positive duty of benevolence...
Kant and Covid Ethics
Despite the popularity of many of Kant’s ethical notions, such as autonomy, dignity and respect for persons, there is a perception, even among Kant scholars themselves, that one cannot reliably derive concrete duties from Kant’s moral philosophy. Against this, I shall argue that — properly understood — Kant’s ethics is of prime importance even today. I shall argue that Kant’s preferred procedure is actually the way we develop new ethical rules during the recent Coronavirus pandemic. In order to demonstrate...
Kant and “Seasickness” of Modernity
On the eve of the tercentenary of Kant’s birth, just as it was a hundred years ago, Kantianism is simultaneously on the receiving end of the blows of history and attacks by rival philosophical parties, both progressivist and reactionary. The radical wings of both parties perceive modernity as a depressing, nauseating period which must be broken with by moving toward the past or toward the future. One of the most original and profound diagnoses of this attitude was offered by Hans Jonas, who discerned...
The Kantian Concept of Human Dignity Today
Although Kant was born three hundred years ago, his practical philosophy is still relevant and helpful for understanding difficult and crucial issues of today. One example is the strange transformation the concept of human dignity has undergone in post-Soviet Russia — in everyday language, in ideological doctrines, and in legal documents. While in ordinary life dignity is increasingly reduced to access to material benefits, in its legal sense — above all in the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation...
Review of Recent Russian Studies of Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy
... interest in Cohen’s philosophy in the last quarter of the century. The teaching of the German philosopher who lived and worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still attracts lively in- terest among Russian philosophers today. Witness the multiple monographs, articles and reports focusing on Cohen’s theory of cognition, his ethics and aesthetics, the search for convergences between the Christian religion and the Judaic tradition, the concept of the philosophy of culture, ...
Russian Political Kant after Liberalism: Sergey Hessen on 1924 Kant Jubilee
... First World War. The fact that the text was first published in the Berlinbased Russian liberal newspaper “Rul’”, gives us reason to see it not just as a formal jubilee tribute, but as an act addressed to the qualified liberal audience which witnessed thecollapse of liberalism in Russia.
Belov, V. N., 2020. “Non-Academic” Neo-Kantian S. I. Hessen. In: V. V. Sapov and T. G. Shchedrina, eds. 2020. Sergey Iosifovich Hessen. Moscow: ROSSPEN, pp. 89-103. (In Rus.)
Berdyaev, N. A., 1918....
Kant’s “Categories of Freedom” as the Functions of Willing an Object
This paper deals with the “Table of the Categories of Freedom” in the second main chapter of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. It provides an account of the role these categories are supposed to play and also of their conceptual content. The key to a proper understanding lies in the realisation that they are derived from the socalled table of judgements in the Critique of Pure Reason and the functions of thinking, which it compiles by means of a metaphysical deduction. I therefore interpret the...
Kantian and Anti-Kantian Philosophy of Language
This paper examines two models of language philosophy. The first is the Kantian philosophy which sees language as an instrument of conveying mental content. I have selected Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl from amongst its numerous representatives. In this tradition, a language expression, i.e. an expression that has meaning, is determined by the objectively ideal character of the meanings (“rules”) given through the subject’s intellectual acts. The main task is to fix with a maximum degree of accuracy...
Lyubov Axelrod on Kant: Reflections on Marxist Discussions of the 1920s and 1930s in the USSR
The authors attempt to look back on discussions of Marxist philosophy and historical materialism in this country without censoring, obfuscating, or simplifying issues in order to assess the prospects of their development. They focus on the work of a follower of Georgy Plekhanov, Lyubov Axelrod, who, in developing the concept of historical materialism, turned to Kant. Axelrod’s published works (from early articles and a dissertation on Tolstoy’s worldview, to her mature works on the history of materialism...
Kants Sendschreiben zum Tod des Studenten Johann Friedrich von Funk (1760). Zur literaturhistorischen Einordnung – Teil 2: Antike Vorbilder der Seelenleitung
In this second installment (for the first, see Kantian Journal, 2024, vol. 43, no. 2), Kant’s references to ancient consolation writings are elaborated. The general aim is to make Kant’s proximity to the Roman Stoa, and his borrowings from it, more apparent. A comparison with his necrology for Funk then shows more explicitly how Kant takes up this ancient philosophy anew for his time, and for his fellow human beings. In so doing, he continued a trend that had begun in the Enlightenment. In Universal...
Transposition — retelling — translation: the destiny of Areopagitica in Slavia Orthodoxa
The article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the challenges associated with translating works from the Corpus Areopagiticum, a collection of theological treatises attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite from the 1st century. However, these works are unequivocally associated with early medieval Eastern Christian mystical-theological thought, presumably from the turn of the 5th—6th centuries. These texts first appeared in the Slavic Orthodox area in 1370, and subsequent translations emerged at...
Semantic potential of the lexeme twilight in Russian poetry
... the dictionary lexical definition, such as in cases of personification and periphrastic renamings like 'twilight witch' or 'twilight monk.' 2) Figurative and symbolic meanings in poetry become notably prominent during the Silver Age. This period witnesses an enrichment of the conventional semantics, with various "extensions" and transformations occurring when the term is used figuratively to characterize transitional states in the realms of the world, history, and consciousness....
Vladimir Bibikhin: the connoisseur of poetry and the poet
The publication of «Selected Records from 1965 to 1989» has exposed the reader to poetry of Vladimir Bibikhin’s poetry as a key to understanding the patterns of culture. In these records, Bibikhin discussed the formation of the canons of national poetry and its peculiarities. In his poetry, Bibikhin emulated the poetic style and essence of Russian poetry, surrounded by the aura of myth and replacing moralistic content with existential themes. These poems delved into the ethical-metaphysical question...
Where and how meanings emerge
The discussion aims to identify the interpretive mechanisms that provide an interface between text and context (between language and the world, language and culture, language and society). It is a multi-level system of interfaces connected by inversion and recursion relations and operations. We identify this system as a pragmasemantics. It also acts as an interface platform for correlation/transformation of intra-system semantic units and extralinguistic objects within a set of possible worlds....
Linguocognitive Bases for the Integration of the Poetic Text into Cinematic Discourse
The article delves into the intricacies of integrating poetic texts into the discourse of authorial cinema. It begins by examining the multifaceted interaction between cinema and poetry within contemporary artistic culture, framing author cinematography through the lens of the poetic concept. Intermediality and interdiscursivity are explored as intrinsic properties of cinema, serving as tools for shaping the unique style and aesthetics of filmmakers. Two films, “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky and...
New Technologies and Pragmatic Techniques in Contemporary Poetry
The paper examines the linguistic and communication changes taking place in poetic discourse under the influence of new media. The digital interface (blogs, social networks, applications) affects the transformation of all the parameters of communication, due to the dominance of information channels and codes. The interaction of poetic language with colloquial speech and the influence of digital technologies lead to the creation of new strategies of subjectivation and addressing in contemporary...
On the Poetic Dispute between Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski
The main purpose of this work is to explore the experience of confronting guilt ‘after Auschwitz’ in the creative dialogue between two significant poets of the twentieth century — Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski. Despite their importance, their works remain inadequately studied, particularly in the context of the interaction between language and existence, or more precisely, poetic semiotics and the ontological foundation of existence. Sander Gilman, an American Germanist, in his work “Why and...
Speech acts and speech genres: the case of the compliment
This article is devoted to the speech act of compliment, which is treated herein as expressing the speaker's attention and partiality to their interlocutor. The similarities and differences between speech acts of compliment and praise are analysed, with the characteristics of compliment linked to the gender and age of the interlocutor. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of speech act and speech genre and the applicability of these notions in analysing the speech act of compliment. When...
Twenty-year olds know the word chuvak, or the second birth of a slang unit
This article examines the pragmatic meaning of the slang lexeme chuvak [dude], primarily when used as an address. The study aims to identify the components of this pragmatic meaning that contributed to the resurgence of the lexical unit in the 21st century after a period of usage decline and oblivion. Currently, the word chuvak is an integral part of youth vernacular.
The pragmatics of the word chuvak was analysed by methods of corpus analysis and questionnaire survey. It was concluded that...
Ideas about private space boundaries and tact in Russian communicative culture: results of a sociolinguistic experiment
This article discusses the results of a survey underlying a reconstruction of ideas about tact and tactlessness in Russian communicative culture.
The author considers the concept of tact to be a communicative strategy within the category of politeness that is closely related to native speakers' notion about the boundaries of private space. Thus, tact is defined as a communicative strategy driven by the speaker's desire to avoid infringing on the private space of their interlocutor. Moreover,...
Digital poetry between the printed page and cinema: the difference in agency structures
This article delves into the early era of 'digital poetry', focusing on poems from the digital poetry collection First Screening (1984) by bpNichol — a poet renowned for his 'movies of words'. Two poems from this collection — 'Letter' and 'After the Storm' — were initially published in print, coming out in 1967 and 1973, respectively. The poet's creative journey from crafting 'poem-pictures' to producing 'poem-movies' sparks inquiries into the contrasting subjective frameworks of printed poems versus...
Russian folk verse and the main approaches to its study
This paper addresses general issues in the study of Russian folk verse. A critical examination of the major theories related to this topic highlights their significance in the history of Russian versification. The unique characteristics of folk verse, which exist in an oral-musical form, necessitate the development of specialized methods for its analysis. While traditional studies of versification offer a variety of methods and resources for analysing different forms of literary verse, they often...
The history of verse studies and formalism
The core idea of formalism is that literature is not merely a function of psychology or social theory and cannot be explained using the tools of these sciences. One could say that poetics is almost the only philological subdiscipline that has managed to preserve the fundamental idea of formalism, explaining poetic facts in terms of poetics itself, rather than through economic, sociological, or psychological means. This is precisely the approach taken by Mikhail Gasparov in his article on the history...
Author-coined terminology in Russian verse theory: the formalist legacy
Any system of terminology serves as a map of the field within which it is employed. The history of terminology, as an integral component of intellectual history, offers valuable insights for methodological reflection. It often prompts a reevaluation of specific issues by returning to their origins and rekindling potential implications and developments that were set aside in the course of the subsequent evolution of the discipline. This paper focuses on several terms that emerged during the formative...
Solidarity strategies in adolescent communication
The study aims to reveal politeness strategies used in natural interaction within a particular community group. The article analyses excerpts from audio recordings of conversations of teenage male friends. The chosen interactional approach relies on Goffman’s notion of face and Brown and Levinson’s model of linguistic politeness, ethnographic methods of collecting data, and conversation analysis. The case study continues the discussion of gender and age aspects of politeness realization and communication...
Speech aggression as a means of preserving and promoting the Neo-pagan worldview: the case of Rodnoverie
The role of verbal aggression in the promotion of specific value-regulatory systems, particularly those of a religious nature, has not been extensively explored in contemporary scholarship. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms by which verbal aggression is produced and employed as a means of preserving and advancing the Rodnoverie ideology within the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. To achieve this, a comprehensive methodology is employed, incorporating both functional-semantic...
Should there be biomolecular pragmatics?
This article demonstrates that the concept proposed by Alexander Spirov reflects the ongoing paradigm shift and inspires new approaches in biosemiotics and semiotic pragmatics. The shift involves a move from describing coding languages to describing languages that regulate them. This requires considering the agentivity (or quasi-subjectivity) of sign systems, which leads to a scenario where the sign system functions as both its subject and object, thus reviving Peirce's idea of the sign as a quasi-mind...
Who and how produces the future (Alexander Fedorov’s new philosophy of common cause)
The article presents a reflection on Alexander Fedorov's project aimed at analysing the future and the model of production. This model facilitates the correlation of factors related to subjectivity and sociality within the process of future production. Notably, the work emphasizes Alexander Fedorov's assertion regarding the pivotal role of children and childhood and the typology of actors involved in this process. The proposed concept and model establish a fertile ground for further interdisciplinary...
Kant and Gender Oppression: Privileged Eighteenth-Century Women, ‘Indirect Domination’ and Gender Emancipation
This paper critically addresses the unwitting gender oppression underpinning Kant’s anthropological and legal approach to domestic labour, highlighting the helpfulness of his analysis of reproductive tasks for casting light on some of the historical causes behind the current view of such labour. With this general aim in mind, I first address the multiple meanings of the term ‘social domination’ as it is used in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Second, I focus on the figurative sense Kant...
Element accumulation in bryophytes in peatland ecosystems of the Kaliningrad region, Russia
The results of studying the accumulation capabilities of mosses in two peatland ecosystems with different levels of disturbance in the Kaliningrad region—on the Bolshoye bog and the Wittgiren peatland—are presented. The study focused on widely distributed species of mosses: Aulacomnium palustre, Polytrichum strictum, Sphagnum centrale, S. cuspidatum, S. fuscum, S. magellanicum, and S. squarrosum, as well as the reference species Pleurozium schreberi. Using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, the content...
Spatial differences in the occupational structure among ethnogeographic groups in the United State
Due to the ethnogeographic diversity of American society, the issue of employment differences between ethnogeographic groups in the United States continues to attract considerable attention from social science researchers. However, despite a substantial body of work on this topic, the question of changes in the employment structure of ethnogeographic groups across space has been relatively overlooked. In this regard, the present study aims to identify spatial differences in the employment of ethnogeographic...