Russian Ontologism: An Overview

Abstract

Russian philosophy underwent many phases: Westernism, Slavophilism, nihilism, pre-revolutionary religious philosophy, and dialectical materialism or Soviet philosophy. At first sight, each one of these phases seems antithetical to the preceding one. Yet, they all appear to have in common a certain negative attitude towards the subjectivism of Kantianism and German Idealism. In contrast to the latter, Russian philosophy typically displays a tendency towards ontologism, which is generally defined as the view that there is such a thing as being in itself, i.e., being independent of cognition, and that this being is to some extent knowable. We discern, in these otherwise diametrically opposed movements, an underlying ontologism that constitutes a common thread running in a straight line through the history of Russian philosophy. In this article, I provide an overview of Russian ontologism.

Traces of mysticism and philosophical personalism in Vladimir S. Solovyov, Nikolai Lossky and Pavel A. Florensky

“…The so-called 'Russian turn towards ontology' finds a ready proponent in Lossky. (Tremblay, 2021) 4 Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky Pavel A. Florensky was the youngest of the three thinkers whom we analyzed in our paper. His family context provided a mix of a typical Russian Orthodox 'priestly' culture (as his father, Aleksandr Florensky, came from an Orthodox 'priestly line') and that of the Armenian nobility (as his mother, Olga Sapharashvili, had her roots in an Armenian noble family residing in Georgia).…”