This dissertation takes as its primary task the evaluation of a conflict of paradigms in Russian philosophical thought in the past decade. If until the early nineties Russian philosophers were often guilty of uncritically attributing to their domestic philosophy a set of characteristics that fell along the lines of a religious/secular binary (e.g. literary vs. analytic; continuous vs. ruptured), in recent years the same scholarship is moving away from the nineteenth-century model of philosophy as a path or special mission, as it has been called by Konstantin Aksakov, Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, and later, Nikolai Berdiaev, among others. I begin in the first chapter by throwing light on these binary assumptions, with the goal of revealing them to be of decreasing value in the past decade, in that they have contributed to the further crystallization of the essentializing ascriptions of the romanticized Orthodox narrative. In the second chapter I then trace the religious paradigm to the twenty-first century, where it continues to thrive in the often criticized sub-departments of the History of Russian Philosophy.
Yet, if the religious narrative has historically been the dominating approach, I argue in chapters three and four that a number of trends have emerged that seek to discredit it, many of which appeal to Western ideals of professionalism while condemning the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia. For these critics, the goal is often not to limit through exceptionalist claims in the style of ninetieth-century religious philosophy, but to open up a discursive field (from both outside and within the religious tradition) in which connections are made between philosophy in Russia and the rest of the world. Thus, the title Between Philosophies touches on the two main observations of this work: 1) that much of philosophical production in Russia remains stratified over the issue of religious thought; and 2) that despite great strides to demystify philosophy in the twentieth century, there remains an often monolithic approach to the discipline, whereby responses to the query What is contemporary Russian philosophy? either delineate a rigid set of requirements or deny the existence of the tradition altogether.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08032010-150635 |
| Date | 30 September 2010 |
| Creators | DeBlasio, Alyssa J |
| Contributors | Tatiana Artemyeva, Vladimir Padunov, James P. Scanlan, Nancy Condee |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08032010-150635/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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