This review is dedicated to the book Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History by the Italian-British philosopher F. Campagna, published in Russian in February 2026. Defined by the author himself as a practical guide to human survival under the pressure of historical forces, this work presents a chronologically consistent, albeit rhizomatic narrative about turning points in the history of various locations in the Mediterranean: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Turkey, etc. The author focuses on the phenomenon of imagination, which, during traumatic historical periods, becomes an important resource for self-preservation for individuals and communities caught in a liminal state between dying and emerging eras. Understood in this way, the effects of imagination include mythmaking, the creation of religious or philosophical schools, translation and literary activity, exile, adventurism, and so on. Each of these effects, according to Campagna, is dictated by a rejection of the dominant objective reality of History, impulses to flee from which, in the reviewer’s view, correlate with the metaphor of lines of flight taken from the works of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. The review also notes that the author’s text seeks not only to talk about imagination, but also to activate the reader’s imagination through the use of literary language, thereby activating imagination on three fronts: the author’s, the reader’s, and the book’s characters’. Furthermore, the reviewer discerns and briefly substantiates the consonance of the key intentions of Otherworlds with at least two philosophical traditions – existentialism and anarchism. The final section presents some critical remarks related to the book’s insufficient research potential and unclear aims.
The article examines the grounds for claiming that a debate took place between E.V. Ilyenkov and D.I. Dubrovsky concerning the problem of the ideal. In the secondary literature, reference is often made to an “unfinished dispute” or a “discussion” between the two thinkers; however, the very existence of such a dispute requires careful verification. The paper reconstructs the fundamental philosophical premises of Ilyenkov and Dubrovsky – their understanding of the subject matter of philosophy, the status of the category of the ideal, and the nature of the relation between mind and material reality. It is shown that their divergence appears already at the level of preliminary definitions and concerns not isolated theses but the very foundations on which the problem is formulated. Special attention is devoted to each author’s interpretation of the key tenets of the Marxist tradition – for example, the formula describing the ideal as the material “transplanted into the human head”. The article analyzes how the difference in their conceptions of the ideal – understood by Ilyenkov as a socio-historical form of thinking and activity, and by Dubrovsky as a subjective reality grounded in the functioning of the individual brain – determines the divergence of their theoretical programs and levels of analysis. It is argued that the texts traditionally regarded as mutual responses do not constitute a dispute in the strict sense, since the two positions lack a shared object of inquiry and a common understanding of what is at issue. The study maintains that beneath the appearance of a debate lies a clash of fundamentally different conceptions of the nature and tasks of philosophy. This case clarifies the character of disagreements within Soviet philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century and highlights the contrast between philosophical and naturalistic models of approaching the problem of the ideal, thereby contributing to a more precise understanding of the history of Russian philosophical thought.
The article examines the origins of the terms “epistemology” and “gnoseology”. It shows that the term “epistemology” was introduced in 1854 by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier, and 40 years later English-speaking philosophers were using the term without mentioning its author. After the emergence of cognitive science in the 1950s and the epistemological boom of the 1960s, “epistemology” became the generally accepted name for the theory of knowledge in world philosophy. In Russian-language philosophy, the term “epistemology” is sometimes used in parallel with the term “gnoseology”, and some philosophers are engaged in gnoseology rather than epistemology. The data are provided, according to which more texts on gnoseology have been written in Russian than in German and English combined. At the same time, the history and origin of the term have remained unclear until now. It is shown that the most likely author of the term “gnoseology” is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who first mentioned this word in 1739. At the same time, the historical and philosophical complexity associated with the fact that Baumgarten invented “gnoseology” when German thinkers were already using the term “gnostology”, which had a similar meaning, is emphasized. The hypothesis is put forward that although “epistemology” and “gnoseology” appeared in different intellectual contexts, we have reason to believe that the emergence of both terms is a consequence of the cognitive turn in Renaissance philosophy.
The current article examines the development of the phenomenological tradition in Russia today. Rather than presenting the approaches of Russian philosophers, the author addresses topics and issues relevant to modern Russian phenomenologists, primarily in the fields of ontology and epistemology. The problem field of modern Russian phenomenology is examined in the light of a critical understanding of the basic principles of Husserl’s philosophy. These are the principles of presuppositionlessness, immediate givenness, the ideal of rigorous science, the inseparability of ontological and epistemological research. In this text, the author also pays special attention to the following phenomenological terms and concepts, various interpretations of which can be found in contemporary Russian phenomenology: constitution, epoché and reduction, givenness, things themselves.
Language is a neutral reservoir-origin of both true and false, as well as deliberately false (deceptive) statements, questions, and descriptions about reality and illusions. The author shares Victoria Welby’s belief that language lacks self-improvement: language as such does not allow us to distinguish truth from falsehood. Statements about language as a source of deception and lies suggest, rather, that language is losing its neutrality due to the social-bodily-emotional elements of communication. The language of time is considered, in its primary social function, to guide prohibitions and permissions along established lines of social labyrinth of interactions. The author proposes a semantic-functional dictionary of the language of time, consisting of four groups of words and phrases, of which only the first group includes exclusively phrases with the word “time”. The article examines the language of time in philosophical concepts using Husserl’s phenomenology as an example, where it becomes one of the main languages after the Logical Investigations. The language of time retains its restrictive functions both within and beyond the doctrine; the “Heraclitean stream” prohibits access to the transcendent and motivates the “exclusion of objective time”, which is the starting point of the method of “phenomenological reduction”, or epoché. Moreover, “epoché” and “retention” (the main term of the concept of subjective time) are words of the Greek and Latin languages, identical in meaning. The concept of the stream of consciousness as a unidirectional train of retentions imposes a significant limitation on the diversity of types of communicative consciousness. The language of time conceals the language of space as the language of movements, boundaries, and differences.
