In Memory of a Mentor, Colleague, and Friend: Nelly Vasilyevna Motroshilova (1934 – 2021)

Abstract

The philosopher, Nelly Vasilyevna Motroshilova, belonged to the generation of Russian intellectuals and cultural figures known as the Sixtiers (shestidesiatniki), the beginning of whose professional careers coincided with the official course of the Destalinization of Soviet society and whose ideals and civic position became associated with striving for a humanistic renewal of public life. As a philosopher, both by training and vocation, she was instrumental in the awakening of Russian philosophy from its dogmatic Marxist slumber and its creative revitalization in the late Soviet period. Her work on German idealism, with a special focus on Kant and Hegel, as well as her incisive examination of Husserl’s phenomenology, is what made her not only an esteemed professor but also one of the most influential historians of philosophy, widely known in both Russia and abroad. This work, rightfully cherished, contributed greatly to the development of philosophy in Russia. Her research over the course of her more-than-six-decade career, in addition to German classic and contemporary philosophy and phenomenology, included Russian philosophy of the Silver Age and of the Soviet period, philosophical sociology, social epistemology, as well as issues of contemporary civilizational progress. She was keenly interested in the antinomies of European unification, the processes which influence the development of values that make up European identity, the specifics of the formation of the contemporary concept of civil society, and the prospects for the social and economic progress of Russia. She warned of the danger of exaggerating the uniqueness of Russian philosophical thought and its consideration outside the context of the development of Western European philosophy. Confident that, despite the specificity of Russian philosophy, it has formed and developed as an integral part of world philosophical culture, she put at the center of her research not the question of differences and oppositions, but rather the investigation of the organic relationship of the