The History of Early Modern Philosophy in Russia

The Case of Archimandrite Gabriel

Abstract

This article is the first part of a study analyzing the formation and transformation of the canon of Early modern philosophy in Russian-language philosophical literature. The canon of Early modern philosophy was fixed in European and American textbooks on the history of philosophy at the end of the 19th century. It is based on the standard narrative about two main rival epistemological traditions, i.e. rationalism, represented by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and empiricism, represented by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. However, this account of the history of Early modern philosophy emerged in a confrontation of different historiographical traditions (Kantian, Hegelian, positivist, etc.), each of which offered its own schemes for classifying and ordering the philosophical systems. Signs of this struggle can be found in the emerging 19th century Russian-language literature on the history of philosophy. This article aims to examine and analyze the narrative on Early Modern philosophy in Russian academic literature of the first half of the 19th century in order to identify prominent trends in the formation of the canon of Early Modern philosophy both from the point of view of its main representatives and from the point of view of the narrative. The focus of this paper is the “History of Philosophy” (1839–40) of Archimandrite Gavriil (Voskresensky), which turns out to be a transmitter of the French historiographical tradition of Victor Cousin to the Russian historiography of philosophy.