In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Mahoney presents a philosophical perspective on the political condition of modern man through an exegesis and analysis of Solzhenitsyn's work. Mahoney demonstrates the tremendous, yet often unappreciated, impact of Sozhenitsyn's writing on twentieth century thinking through an examination of the writer's profoundly important critique of communist totalitarianism in a judicious and original mix of western and Russian, Christian and classical wisdom.

To begin with the bad news. Mahoney does not write well. He moves in perplexing ways from the stylistic register of the journalistic, to that of the scholarly, to political philosophy and back again. His knowledge of Russian seems shaky or doubtful. The key work of Georges Nivat is given a handsome accolade but is never engaged seriously. It is not clear whether he is aware of the publication of the third volume of The Red Wheel, March 1917, in the (...) original, but also in French translation. This volume would have strengthened Mahoney’s argument. (shrink)

Confucianism and Legalism are two schools of Chinese philosophy. This chapter explores contrasts between Confucian and Legalist visions of the nation, the family, and the soul through Zuko's journey. It covers the tension between the legacies of his two great‐grandfathers, Sozin and Roku, and shows that the battle within Zuko and the royal family is at root a philosophical struggle between these two differing philosophical visions. Finally, the chapter addresses that Zuko's battle within reflects something true about human nature that (...) the Legalists and the Confucians partly grasped, and which one twentieth‐century villain‐turned‐hero, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, helps clarify. The Legalists emphasized natural tendencies toward evil. Zuko's story suggests that both schools point to something true in human nature, that human beings have the natural capacity for both good and evil, and that it is all too human to be deceived by evil masquerading as good. (shrink)

Antigone’s afterlives in Ireland have always enacted critical gestures of social protest and mourning that expose the fundamental fragility of human rights caught up in the symbolic conflict between oppressors and oppressed. This paper seeks to explore the scope of rereading certain Irish figurations of Antigone – the exemplary text of European humanism – through a posthumanist lens that unveils new and radical understandings of modern injustices, legal fissures, and capitalist insinuations of an “inhuman politics” against proletarian minorities in twentieth-century (...) Irish society in transnational contexts. The possibilities of a posthumanist theorization of Antigone at the intersection with gender, class, and human rights, reflect the connecting threads, political, aesthetic, and critical, between two texts: an early twentieth-century anonymous poem titled “The Prison Graves” dedicated to Irish human rights activist and revolutionary Roger Casement and an unpublished play-version of Antigone by Aidan C. Mathews in 1984, dedicated to René Girard. Written and produced as a critique of systematic institutional violence and neoliberal capitalist oppression during the epoch of the anti-revolutionary zeitgeist, the myth of Antigone shifts its dialectic from the nationalist nostalgia of “The Prison Graves” to the play-version of the Cold War era to reciprocate a counter-protest against the passing of the Irish Justice Bill. Antigone is reimagined as a hypochondriac resident of the slums of the proletariat and a member of a degenerate acting troupe. Her classical (mythical), aristocratic (white, European, Western) figure has become a posthuman commodity: a proletarian actor now, she performs the same role for millennia in a post-nuclear contaminated prison state in Thebes/Dublin. Peteokles is a bourgeois-turned-rebel mediary; Polyneikes is remembered as a communist terrorist who has been airbrushed from the records of the police state; a bibliophile Ismene religiously reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and the Chorus is the real state oppressor. (shrink)

In the wake of Stalin’s death and the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s early fictions, Georg Lukács claimed to discern a revivification of socialist realism, the officially-sanctioned school of Soviet literature. A furtherance of that process was integral to the “renaissance of Marxism” and vitalization of socialist democracy that he hoped would restore the faith in socialism shaken by the Stalinist era. Although he dared not admit it, he envisioned a socialist realism cast in the image of bourgeois “critical realism.”.

The weeks-long rioting and the destruction of property were more than just a hyper reaction to apparent racial discrimination in 2020. We might interpret this anti-social and criminal behavior as having its origin with an envy and resentment over things material. We were warned about this misuse of our freedom more than forty years ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finding our way back from a materialist-saturated vision of the good life depends on taking up a Christian humanism which was championed (...) by Pope Saint John Paul II. We see that Christian humanism expressed vividly in family life. (shrink)

Matthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.

En sus páginas recoge el mensaje que Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lanza al pueblo ruso en 1947 antes de ser desterrado. El disidente sabe que la manera de combatir el totalitarismo soviético no es otra que mantenerse fiel a la verdad. Ante la amenaza de un sistema que nubla la capacidad racional del ser humano, que pretende instrumentalizar a la sociedad y que desde sus propios orígenes es pura falsedad, la mejor arma es la defensa de la verdad.

This article discusses the role of Gulag literature in connection to testimony, literature and historical documentation. Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, the article examines the difficulty of witnesses being believed in the absence of evidence. In particular, the article focuses on the vulnerability of the Gulag authors, due to the ongoing Soviet repression at the time of their writing. It examines the interplay between the repression and the literature that exposed it. The article contends that (...) the fictionalization of Gulag literature enabled the authors to go further in challenging Soviet repression. Focusing on the fictional accounts written by Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it argues that the fictionalized Gulag literature makes the experience of the camp universe possible to imagine for those outside, allowing readers to believe in an experience that otherwise seems incredible. (shrink)

This article discusses the foundation of ideas for Vyacheslav Ivanov’s interpretation of Pushkin’s poem. In The Gypsies, Ivanov sees a conflict between personal freedom and sobornost’ as revealed b...

I. "Filosofskiĭ paroxod": k istorii voprosa -- II. Respressii i permanentnai︠a︡ ėmigrat︠s︡ii︠a︡ -- III. Overkili russkoĭ filosofii -- IV. Postsovetskiĭ period: v poiskakh identichnosti -- V. Vozvrashchenie "filosofskogo paroxoda" (2003) -- VI. "Filosofskie avtobusy" -- VII. Samolet-paroxod-"filosofskiĭ poezd" -- VIII. Afinskiĭ kongress: prikosnovenie k istorii (2013) -- IX. "Uchitʹsi︠a︡ bytʹ chelovekom": XXIV vsemirnyĭ filosofskiĭ kongress -- X. Mezhdu proshlym i budushchim.

First comprehensive introduction to information theory explores the work of Shannon, McMillan, Feinstein, and Khinchin. Topics include the entropy concept in probability theory, fundamental theorems, and other subjects. 1957 edition.

The article is devoted to Berdyaev's first Italian journey, which had a "tremendous influence" both on his creative destiny and on the development of his aesthetic views. It is significant that one of the defining motives for visiting Italy was his desire to "return to his homeland impressed by the greatest beauty"! Since the first journey of the philosopher was connected with Florence, it seemed appropriate to pay due attention to the achievements of this city and its decisive contribution to (...) the formation and development of the culture of the Renaissance. The formation of revivalist principles in Florentine literature and fine arts is shown; the formation of theory (Alberti) and the history of art (Vasari), as well as a number of cultural phenomena accompanying these processes, which ultimately determined the artistic and aesthetic appearance of Florence and turned it into the capital of the Italian Renaissance. As a result, this makes it possible to fully understand and appreciate Berdyaev’s choice of this particular city, especially since Florence not only made “the strongest impression” on him, but also became the “key” to understanding both Florentine art proper and artistic-aesthetic culture Italian Renaissance. This is the first attempt in Russian literature to consider and analyze Berdyaev's Florentine journey as one of the sources of his creative heritage, which has not yet become the subject of special study. The relevance of topic is also determined by the existing confusion on this issue, which the article is aimed at overcoming. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel reasons that comedy responds to the fact that democratic ideals become a subject for a joke when enacted: progressive values such as free speech enable...

This article provides a brief systemic analysis of the key concepts of the so-called new science of art developed by the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr. The result of Seldmayr’s pursuits are reflected in creation of his own philosophy of art and culture based on a particular worldview. The cognition of the whole, along with individual and unique, underlies this science. Understanding is the goal of scientific knowledge for Sedlmayr. It suggests not only abstract knowledge, but peculiar existential experience as (...) well. Sedlmayr interprets the understanding of artwork as its contemplation, which in turn, is identical to its actualization or presence. In Seldlmayr’s art of science, epistemologies and ontologies merge into each other. He interprets artworks simultaneously as the event and as the social organism, which overcomes the linearity of time and fragmentation of plurality. This artificial complex system, built on the paradoxical identity of the single and plenty, is both finite and infinite. Sedlmayr’s views encompass classical and nonclassical approach towards cognition of the whole. He relies on the principles of monism, seeking to reduce all concepts to a single basis, single point of singularity that designates the synthesis of all the moments of the whole and can be expressed by a single category. The main category, which resembles the center of the opposites, is the “midpoint”. The aforementioned ideas are consistent and logical only in such scientific worldview that identifies ontology and epistemology, which implies the unity of contemplation and phenomenon of the artwork. Therefore, in Sedlmayr's constructions, actualization or revival of the artwork is identical with its comprehension. The systemic approach towards the artwork reflected in the theoretical works of Sedlmayr extends the boundaries of art science and converges with philosophy. (shrink)

One of the main trends of modern society is a marked increase of the theoretical interest to the sphere of mythology and the theory of myth. And in light of globalization approaches explicitly focus on the impact study of the regional aspects of social phenomena. In this regard, in regional studies of mythology appear attempts seen the myth city's as a socially formalized knowledge about the city or region, a strong regulatory and mobilization element in society, which is capable of (...) forming a regional entity and identity. A problem is in that every city has the own myths and specific municipal culture. It can be one of reasons of conflicts at co-operation of townspeople of different regions because all of us are inclined to identify itself with a sub-group on the sign of place of inhabitation, line of business or the world view. Thus, at all cities have different myths and symbols. We are inclined to see our city as city of the chosen townspeople, while other cities and regions are inhabited by demons and monsters. The article suggests to consider the city like a self-valuable phenomenon. The article submitted to scientific use of the term "the myth city's" which, the author's perspective is not identical to the concept of "myths of the city" and "Mythology of the city." also authors conducted analysis the history of the formation of the Donetsk's myth, identified the main stages of its formation, and conducted explication of its meaningful and functional characteristics. (shrink)

In the article, the authors have raised an urgent topic related to the provision of state support for rural areas. Attention is focused on the deficit of most of the budgets of both the municipal and regional levels, which does not contribute to the development of the infrastructure of the territories. In addition, the low investment attractiveness does not allow relying on private capital. The authors are confident in the rationality of the development of public-private partnership, as the most optimal (...) form of relationship between private capital and public authorities. (shrink)

Frankfurt-type cases with covered manipulation received a great attention in the debates about freedom of will and moral responsibility. They pretend to give the refutation of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities and to show that we can intuitively blame or praise an agent who was not able to do otherwise. In this paper, I will try to make explicit some basic intuitions underlying the agent’s responsibility in Frankfurt-type cases, which were surprisingly ignored in the contemporary debates. The key intuition is (...) that the responsibility of the agent in Frankfurt-type cases is always grounded at the point of overcoming the uncertainty preceding action. This overcoming is crucially important for agent’s responsibility and immune to any manipulation of counterfactual intervener. (shrink)