End of Russian Philosophy

The early 1990s saw a dramatic rise of optimism in philosophy in Russia, a rise marked by the triumphant return of Russian religious philosophy, the founding of new independent philosophy journals, and collaboration between Russian philosophers and the introduction of academic freedom following nearly 75 years of Soviet rule the rest of the world. Already by the mid-2000s, however, the enthusiasm of the 1990s regarding the state of philosophy in Russia had given way to widespread pessimism, whereby Russia's philosophers regularly denied the existence of the discipline altogether. The End of Russian Philosophy describes and evaluates the troubled state of philosophy in Russia in the post-Soviet decades, as Russia's thinkers find themselves caught between two incompatible definitions of philosophy: a nineteenth-century nationalist and religious view of Russian philosophy as essentially Russian and a universal conception of philosophy as a profession without geographical or denominational allegiances. Thus, as a new generation of scholars, alongside their Western colleagues, seeks to revive philosophy as a universal and professionalized discipline, the Russian intellectual climate of the twenty-first century has become identifiable by a preoccupation with what may be the end of the nationalist narrative in Russian philosophy.