This article offers a phenomenological interpretation of Alexei Navalny’s political testimony through the concepts of futurity, active despair, skeptical epoche, and symbolic institution. Rather than approaching Navalny primarily as an opposition politician, it examines the existential and symbolic structures underlying his political practice. The argument unfolds in three stages. First, drawing on the philosophical reflections of Merab Mamardashvili, Grigory Pomerants, and Vladimir Bibikhin, the article reconstructs the notion of active despair and argues that Navalny’s vision of the “Beautiful Russia of the Future” emerged not from political optimism but from a refusal to surrender the future to historical catastrophe. Second, it analyzes skeptical epoche as a phenomenological technique of defamiliarization capable of disrupting ideological self-evidence and reopening the possibility of political judgment. Third, it investigates the emergence of necrospeak (a concept introduced by the anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova), the privatization of meanings, and the formation of a new collective body in contemporary Russia through the transformation of political language, historical memory, and commemorative practices. The article argues that the conflict between Navalny’s politics of futurity and contemporary Russian necrospeak cannot be reduced to the opposition between democracy and authoritarianism. At stake is a deeper struggle over the symbolic constitution of reality itself: between openness, plurality, and historical possibility, on the one hand, and mythologized memory, semantic control, and symbolic closure, on the other. Within this context, Navalny’s final testimony appears not as a political program but as an act of witness aimed at preserving the future as an existential and political possibility.
The study interprets the de-Sovietization of Latvian philosophy as a complex process of intellectual reorientation rather than a radical rupture. It examines public debates on the role of philosophers, philosophy textbooks, the transformation of philosophical terminology, and the expansion of translations of Western philosophical works. The article also analyzes the rewriting of the historiography of philosophy in Latvia. Together, these developments suggest that the philosophical landscape after 1991 was shaped by processes of reinterpretation, selective continuity, and institutional adaptation, demonstrating how elements of Soviet philosophical practice were simultaneously rejected, transformed, and partially preserved within the emerging intellectual culture.
Although Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin is renowned as a satirical writer and political journalist, his prose style and his theory of literature have received comparatively little attention. To demonstrate the importance of Shchedrin as a “theorist,” I present a reading of his posthumously published essay “Contemporary Specters” (Sovremennye prizraki) (1863). This essay is both an ideological manifesto and, as analysis of its crucial passages and rhetoric reveals, an elucidation of Shchedrin’s assumptions about how language becomes literary, and how literature evolves. I argue that the central metaphor of the “specter,” a linguistic construct that obscures reality and eventually dialectically engenders new specters, functions to illustrate how Shchedrin himself writes: his approach to parody and hyperbole, as I suggest with a reading of the beginning of History of a Town (Istoriia odnogo goroda) (1869–70), is analogous to his description of how specters operate. This framework anticipates assumptions about art and its relationship with life that would become prominent in the early twentieth century. I also relate the essay to a broader, political left-liberal discourse in the 1840s and 1850s. Writers like Belinsky and Herzen used the term “specter” to denote ideas that were not borne out by material reality. “Specters” meaningfully changes the meaning of the preceding political term by relating it to literature and language. Besides its significance for Shchedrin as a writer and thinker, then, “Contemporary Specters” is also an important case study in the relationship between political and literary discourse during this period. Tracing the changing function of the term “specter” demonstrates that, although the border between politics and literature is porous, literature remains somewhat distinct from politics even for a writer like Shchedrin.
The article analyzes the early thought of Lev Shestov through the media theory of Friedrich A. Kittler, focusing on how discourse networks shape subjectivity and cultural expression. Kittler’s concept of Aufschreibesysteme shows that technologies and institutions like writing and schooling structure not only texts but also human consciousness. Around 1800, alphabetic literacy became an autonomous medium that disciplined thinking and distanced individuals from embodied experience, contrasting the affective “mother’s language” with the abstract, rule-bound “father’s language.” Shestov’s upbringing in Kiev under the Prussian-influenced system of the Russian Empire reflects this dynamic. His early essays reveal how writing both organizes existence and limits authentic expression, echoing tensions similar to those experienced by Friedrich Nietzsche. In works such as Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, he resists rationalist interpretation and emphasizes the tragic and irreducible aspects of human experience. Shestov’s philosophy centers on suffering, groundlessness, and existential freedom, rejecting systematic rationality. His aphoristic style and his association of philosophy with music suggest a search for modes of expression beyond rigid textual structures, highlighting the paradox of literacy as both enabling and constraining thought.
The article is dedicated to the special issue of Philosophy of Central and Eastern Europe in Troubled Times. It presents the “Lithuanian pondering” of Arvydas Šliogeris as a foundational response to some of the key troubles of our time such as the dominance of the machinic, the diminishment of life, the surplus of language and the destructive manner of “cognition” with respect to things and people and the mediated character of existence. The response includes, first and foremost, the key notion of Sensible Transcendence as well as the accompanying notion of Substantial Individual. The leitmotif in these considerations by Šliogeris is the distinction and opposition between things in themselves and things as they appear in instrumental relations. This is developed into the ontological pair of Isness and Notness, or Nihil. The article shows that these notions in a way mirror or develop Schopenhauerian, Nietzschean and Heideggerian critiques of cognition, culture and technology and presents them as an interpretative appropriation of the Kantian Ding an sich, as mediated via Schopenhauer’s notion of Will and Nietzschean Dionysian Life (as well as sensuousness) with a strong emphasis on the thinghood of things characteristic of Heidegger. In the course of his “Lithuanian pondering” Šliogeris develops a retrieval of the ancient Greek original notion of kosmos as rooted in human familiarity with things as well as notions of philotopy and photosophy and that of pondering, rooted in the sensible/perceptible, as opposed to thinking, which tends towards abolition and, thus, destruction of the sensible and the substantial.
This article explores the complex relationship between Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) and Semyon Frank (1877–1950) within the context of the Eurasianism movement. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, the study provides a detailed biographical account of their involvement in the Eurasian project during their exile in Germany and Lithuania. The narrative distinguishes between Karsavin’s active role as a controversial ideologue and Frank’s peripheral, autonomous collaboration. While Frank recognized certain intellectual insights in Eurasianism, he remained critical of its nationalist and totalitarian tendencies, insisting on his independence. Ultimately, the article emphasizes that the personal bond and mutual support between Karsavin and Frank transcended their ideological differences and the institutional challenges of the Russian émigré community, illustrating a profound intellectual and human connection that endured amidst the hardships of exile.
This article examines the problem of constructing a Soviet myth of the October Revolution supplemented by consistent exclusion of alternative contemporaneous interpretations. Building on theories of cultural and communicative memory (Halbwachs; Assmann), the analysis investigates why representations of the Revolution that diverged from the official Soviet discourse failed to become stabilized within collective memory. Drawing on ego-documents produced by contemporaries (Bunin, Sorokin, Gorky, and Plekhanov), the study reconstructs displaced narratives that conceptualized the Revolution as social catastrophe rather than historical progress. By juxtaposing these narratives with demographic data from the 1937 census and statistics on political repression, the article demonstrates that the institutional interruption of intergenerational mechanisms of experiential transmission facilitated the replacement of alternative narratives with an ideologically sanctioned construct. This finding contributes to broader debates on the role of state capacity and symbolic power in the consolidation and naturalization of hegemonic historical narratives.
One of the distinctive features of Lev Shestov’s works is that most of them are based on the thought and life stories of other thinkers. These include Russian writers, European philosophers, religious leaders, ancient philosophers, and biblical prophets. Some of Shestov’s books already have these personalities in their titles and their spectrum continues to expand during the course of his work. The biographical method is a continuous feature of Shestov’s writing. The way he uses it, however, is far removed from common notions of “scientific” or “philosophical” biography. Since the early twentieth century, critics have noted that Shestov’s interpretations are subjective and contain shortcomings in chronology and factual accuracy. Shestov arbitrarily decides which literary character embodies the author’s voice and which does not, confusing authors with their fictional heroes. But there is no need to view this approach as a mistake or deficiency. This specific approach is a conscious part of Shestov’s method. Shestov first removes conventional biographical contexts so that he can subsequently construct his own narrative from them. He proceeds in part as the author of a literary work, for whom the characters in question serve as an authorial mask. Nevertheless, this is not a mystification or a game. Through his method, he reaches a personal level without resorting to autobiography. He penetrates more deeply into the essence of the problem that interests him and achieves a deeper level of meaning.
This paper examines the key features of the non-substantial ontology developed by Egon Bondy (born Zbyněk Fišer) in his seminal works of the 1960s and offers one of the first systematic introductions to Bondy’s ontological thought in English. The study situates his philosophy within the broader context of the Czech Marxist philosophical movement of the period and explains why ontology became a central concern of Czechoslovak Marxist philosophy during the 1960s. It reconstructs Bondy’s systematic critique of substantial ontological models, showing why, in his view, they inevitably lapse into metaphysical dualism, devalue concrete existence, and ultimately foreclose the possibility of freedom and meaningful existence. In opposition both to the tradition of substantial ontology grounded in self-subsistent individuals and to the Heideggerian ontological tradition, Bondy formulates a processual and relational non-substantial ontology in which reality consists exclusively of hierarchically structured sets, “events,” or “single-units,” and in which the primacy of structure and relations is emphasized. This article, however, goes beyond mere exposition of Bondy’s philosophical system and argues that his contra-intuitive theoretical claims retain considerable relevance for contemporary philosophy and related fields. In particular, the second part of the article demonstrates striking parallels between Bondy’s non-substantial model of ontological reality and certain contemporary cosmological theories, especially the cosmological model developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok.
The paper explores the relation between fragmentary writing and the category of the impossible, focusing on Lev Shestov’s early work. Based on a comparative reading of Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness alongside selected works by Paul Valéry and Maurice Blanchot, the paper presents three distinct movements through which fragmentary writing approaches the impossible. The paper argues that each author understands the impossible differently, leading their fragments to enact different movements: for Valéry, fragments trace controlled paths through mental states that would otherwise exceed our control; for Blanchot, they maintain a distance that lets the unknown remain unknown while keeping a relation to it. Against this background, the paper highlights Shestov’s distinctive position, claiming that for him, the impossible is produced by the self-imposed limits of rational necessity—it is not a separate domain, but a category existing only in relation to reason. Shestov’s fragmentary writing both questions this rational boundary and insists on what lies beyond it. The paper argues that his fragmentary, nonsequential writing severs the connections generating rational necessity and thus refuses to rule anything out as impossible. This allows for a claim to the impossible without turning it into a doctrine or a guarantee that the impossible will actually occur. On this basis, the paper offers a nonskeptical reading of early Shestov.
While there is a widespread view among left-leaning scholars that the contemporary international order is shaped by “neoliberal doctrines,” there could be a reasonable question whether “neoliberal” is a suitable term for the picture. The problem of power, the idea of economic de-concentration, the primacy of human dignity over corporate profits, and the appeals to protect market mechanisms from the influence of corporate groups played a central role in the outlook of German ordoliberals, who not only were active participants in the founding neoliberal gatherings, but who also reportedly introduced the term “neoliberalism” in the academic discourse. Particular attention in the ordoliberal theory was paid to the issue of constructing a sustainable international order; however, their position is evidently overlooked in modern literature. The present research aims to revive interest in the original ordoliberal view on the international economic system and to apply this approach to the analysis of the contemporary issues. It also explores the perception of the ordoliberal perspective in post-Soviet discourse, where this school of thought has received limited but noteworthy interest.
Izydora Dąmbska has argued that since the concept of language is constructed within a language, the concept of truth cannot be exhausted by a choice between the different theories of truth, i.e., correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic. The aim of this paper is to show how Dąmbska’s distinction between the concept and property of truth gives rise to an absolute notion of truth. To achieve this aim, I begin with a brief history of the problem of truth in the Lvov–Warsaw School. Following this, I turn to a discussion of the women philosophers in the Lvov–Warsaw School, specifically Kokoszyńska and Dąmbska, who offered novel analyses of the nature of truth. This section permits me to turn to Dąmbska’s concept of language and how that concept paves the way for a clear distinction between the concept and property of truth. Given that Dąmbska’s work does this, we see relatively immediately how an absolute notion of truth may arise from that distinction and how she carries on the tradition of defending truth against relativistic encroachment.
This paper explores the reception of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy in socialist Yugoslavia, with a particular focus on its influence among the Marxist humanist philosophers of the Praxis circle. The group of philosophers and sociologists associated with the journal Praxis and the Korčula Summer School sought to synthesize Marxist philosophy with other philosophical traditions. A key aspect of their intellectual endeavor was their insistence on maintaining a critical stance toward reality. Their interpretation of philosophy in socialist societies began to diverge from the official approach to Marxist humanism. For the Praxis thinkers, philosophy was meant to uphold a continuous critique of reality, defending the ideals of the socialist revolution rather than reinforcing ideology. They argued that ossifying these ideals into ideology was precisely what had occurred in the socialist parties of Eastern and Central Europe, as well as in Yugoslavia itself. After a brief inquiry into the genealogy of the reception of Kant’s philosophy in Yugoslavia, the paper situates Kant’s broader project of Enlightenment thought within the Yugoslav context, emphasizing the importance of his ideas regarding rationality, universalism, and autonomy. Furthermore, the paper examines the intellectual exchanges between Kantian and Marxist frameworks in criticizing ideology, particularly as they relate to Yugoslav debates on socialism and democracy.
Mamardashvili is not typically regarded as a theorist of love. However, we would like to argue that love can be seen as one of the core components of his philosophizing, serving as a crucible of the human condition. He presents love as an unnatural and therefore fragile phenomenon, existing alongside consciousness, civilisation, personality, philosophy etc., that is to be continuously maintained and therefore recreated (in line with the cartesian law of continuous creation) in opposition to chaotically, naturally occurring processes. According to Mamardashvili, experiencing love may be seen as an act that contributes something to the structure of the world and not only to the people engaged in this relationship—a claim that may seem paradoxical when understood in terms of “classical” ontology. In this paper, we explore the way Mamardashvili understands the possibilities of such a recreation, arguing that his position is primarily ontological rather than moral in nature, challenging the Arendtian understanding of worldliness and therefore, potentially, her understanding of love as unpolitical.
In this article, we examine the idea of the method of analytic description as a theoretical link connecting Brentano’s philosophy and the Lvov–Warsaw School via a systematic historico-philosophical approach. Building on Czeżowski’s claim that the method was devised by Brentano, Twardowski, and Blaustein, this study situates the Lvov–Warsaw School within the Brentanian tradition. In section two, Brentano’s nuanced position is presented, vis-à-vis the use of description in psychological research, drawing a distinction between two phases. The third section reconstructs the theoretical foundations of analytic description in Czeżowski and Twardowski. Section four analyzes Blaustein’s On the Perception of the Radio Play as a case study illustrating his methodological approach. The article concludes by assessing whether the methodological procedures devised by the aforementioned members of the Lvov–Warsaw School constitute a genuine implementation of the analytic method introduced and developed by Brentano.
This article traces an implicit theory of embodiment across the work of poet and labor theorist Aleksei Gastev, from his 1904 short story “The Accursed Question” through his poetry and commentary of 1907–1913, to his 1919 essay “On the Tendencies of Proletarian Culture,” and his work at the Central Institute of Labor. It argues that gender appears in Gastev’s early writing as a traumatic feature of individual subjectivity under capitalism—a wound produced by the fragmentation of the body into sexually differentiated zones—and that his later work reconceives embodiment in terms that render gender irrelevant. In “The Accursed Question,” masculinity is compulsory and alienating, defined by biological compulsions and social rituals that fragment body and psyche. Gastev’s mature work proposes an alternative: the machinic reorganization of the body through trained reflexes, producing a “proletarian unit” defined not by what it is but by what it does. Drawing on Bekhterev’s reflexological psychology, Gastev envisions a “mechanized collective” in which individual subjectivity—and the gendered suffering it enables—dissolves into collective being. The article situates this trajectory within late imperial Russian biopolitics and early Soviet labor culture and suggests that the questions Gastev’s work raises remain urgent today.
This review critically analyses the recent book by Mykhailo Minakov, The Post-Soviet Human: Philosophical Reflections on Social History after the end of Communism. It discusses the structure of the argument in the book and confronts it with two challenges: a conceptual one and a formal one. The conceptual challenge examines whether the idea of a post-Soviet human stands up to critiques with regard to its scope and precision. The formal one interrogates the claim about a temporal cesura in 2022 signifying the end of the post-Soviet epoch. It concludes that Minakov’s concept of “post-Soviet human” indeed stands up to most of the critique, as it successfully and methodically encapsulates a specific collective experience across the Eastern European and Northern Eurasian region, in a very particular period in history.
The objective of the present paper is to establish a fundamental interest in new critical and re-evaluative concepts. The present study sets out to investigate the formation of philosophical thought in the Slovak and Czech philosophical space. The metamorphosis of their interest is determined by fundamental events, such as the revolution of 1989. The paper focuses on the work of Milan Zigo, who faced dilemmas both in his personal life and in his professional capacity as a philosopher and academic authority figure. This study examines the period encompassing the watershed events of 1989, both during and following this significant era. The emphasis is on an analysis of Zigo’s legacy presented in the journal Filozofia. On this textual basis, it reflects on the motif of the stable and concomitantly, of the uncertain. The work under scrutiny herein delineates the aforementioned positions in Zigo’s critical reflection of the philosophical work of Igor Hrušovský.
