Russian religious philosophy in the optics of intellectual history

Abstract

The article focuses on discussing a methodology for the study of Russian religious philos­ophy in the conditions of the linguistic and corporate divide between the history of Rus­sian thought and contemporary philosophy. Describing this divide, V. Sidorin emphasizes that historians can distance themselves from their subjects without resorting to overly neg­ative evaluations of the Russian philosophical tradition, including its religious dimension. The analysis of Russian religious philosophy, informed by Sidorin’s insights, can be im­plemented within the theoretical framework proposed by Cambridge school of intellectual history. This approach advocates for a reading of texts as actions guided by several prin­ciples: the reconstruction of polemical contexts and authors’ intentions (Q. Skinner); an avoi­dance of disciplinary evaluations (R. Rorty), presentism (S. Hutton), and historiography of philosophy as merely a history of systems (L. Catana); an emphasis on the philosopher’s personality, their thinking and ways of live (I. Hunter, O. Vlasova); and an examination of semantic fluidity and the polemical redefinition of concepts (H. Lübbe). The proposed methodology, grounded in the late Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, diverges from N. Plotnikov’s normative and disciplinary approach, which is based on the German history of concepts criticized by Skinner. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Ch. Taylor’s theory of secularization and K. Antonov’s research on Russian philosophy, secularization as a polemical context of Russian religious philosophy can be explored without disregarding the “subjective” dimensions of thought and meaning, which are reconstructed through a fo­cus on authors’ intentions and the multiplicity of polemical situations.