The Institutional Aspect of the Formation of the Russian Philosophical Language: Towards the Formulation of the Problem

Abstract

The article problematizes the historical and cultural process of the formation of the Russian philosophical language as one of the key events in the history of Russian philosophical thought. The key examples of reflection on the course of the Russian philosophical terminology’s development (related to the names of A.D. Kantemir, G.N. Teplov, A. Fryazinovsky, A.S. Pushkin, V.N. Karpov, A.I. Galich, S.S. Gogotsky, N.Ya. Grot, V.S. Solovyov) are briefly considered. The author proves that the study of this section of the history of Russian philo­sophy involves special attention to the institutional infrastructure that created the environment and methods of production, translation and reproduction of phi­losophical knowledge, accumulating, discarding and consolidating terminologi­cal innovations. He pays special attention to the journal “Questions of Philoso­phy and Psychology” and to the consideration of the intellectual platform posed by the chief editor of the journal N.Ya. Grot, that is, to the task of creating a na­tional philosophical language, which are dealt with both in the context of the in­tellectual program of the project and in the general context of the history of the development of Russian philosophical terminology. The author recon­structs the nature of the collective research project “Questions of Philosophy and Psychology”, as well as the key points of its program – solving the “problem of life” as the main goal of philosophy, searching for new foundations for meta­physics and ethics through a radical rethinking of the subject of metaphysics and the union of natural science and philosophical knowledge (through the union of philosophy and psychology). The author concludes that the history of the jour­nal “Questions of Philosophy and Psychology” marks a new stage in the devel­opment of the Russian philosophical language, which represents the transforma­tion of philosophy into a discursive public force, and philosophical utterance into a means of communicative influence on social and political reality.