Vladimir Bibikhin's Philosophical Heritage

Abstract

In October 2021, the Third Bibikhin Readings were held in Bezhetsk (Tver Region), which once again brought together well-known experts and young researchers from various Russian universities from St. Petersburg to Rostov-on-Don. The special issue of Philosophy. The Journal of the Higher School of Economics on the relevance of Bibikhin's philosophy gets published concerning the Bezhetsk conference. The selected articles present large-scale authentic Bibikhin themes such as “the Event”, “the moods”, “the woods”, “one's own”, and so on. The special issue opens with the article by Mikhail Bogatov, co-authored with Dar’ya Pavlova, which poses a methodical task to formulate the difficulties that arise when describing the “Invisible Community” of Vladimir Bibikhin. It deals with the circle of interlocutors who co-determined the intellectual atmosphere of Moscow in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period and implicitly formed the context of their creative searches. The object of consideration here is deliberately general: pre-lecture and lecture periods of Bibikhin's philosophical work. The theme of self-recognition in Bibikhin's philosophy is the focus of the following article. Kate Khan refers to the early lecture courses of the late 1980s – early 1990s. “World”, “Know Yourself”, and “Property” reconstruct how Bibikhin's “hermeneutics of the Self” unfolds, showing how it differs from the psychoanalytic interpretation of the personality. Yevgeniya Shestova explores with Bibikhin's hermeneutic ethics a new dimension of hermeneutics that opens up in a specific “ethics of reading”: the latter is understood not as a technique but as a praxis of human life that responds to the Event of reading. Anastasiya Merzenina pays attention to Bibikhin's reflection on Russian history in the context of modern political philosophy. Her article Political “Event” and Law in The Philosophy of Vladimir Bibikhin: Ontic Aspect and Superhethic Dimension comes from an exciting hypothesis that the political subject of Vladimir Bibikhin is always in the sphere of political decision and cannot be excluded from it. A bold study by Daria Efimova takes on another non-standard topic: Intoxication by the Woods as a Case of Captivation. Reflections on “living matter” in the lecture course The Woods (Hyle) are compared here with the interpretations of some commentators on Aristotle (Tatyana Vasilyeva, Paul Ricoeur, Alexei Chernyakov). The comparison goal is to move from the historical and philosophical perspective to the phenomenological question, “In what relationship with matter are we?”. Finally, in the articles Intuition of Faith in the Religious and Anthropological thought of Vladimir Bibikhin and Authentic and Philosophical Anthropology of Authentic and Non-authentic: Modern Problematization of Human Person and Way of Life, several significant existential-anthropological problems related to the religious dimension of Bibikhin's philosophy are raised. Dmitriy Ustimenko extracts the “intuition of faith” or the “ontology of faith” of the Russian philosopher from disparate facts and statements, which are pretty accurate and self-significant. A whole range of characteristics of faith unfolds sacrifice, fidelity, trust in God, riskiness, and confidence. And in a large-scale study by Daniil Dorofeyev again sounds, the theme of “recognizing oneself”: consideration of the well-known Bibikhin interpretation of Alcibiades I in the course Property is preceded by an appeal to the personalistic concept of M. Scheler and the distinction between eigentlich and uneigentlich in M. Heidegger's Dasein-analysis. The author creatively rethinks this material in the light of his philosophical task — to reveal the positive ontological and personal potential of everyday existence. In the spirit of patristic hermeneutics, he proposes four possible models of the relationship between the authentic and the non-authentic, typologically traceable to the New Testament images of Martha and Mary.

The second block of studies in this issue includes six articles, united by widespread attention to the problems of moral and political philosophy. The article Justification of Epistemic Authority: The Potential of the Liberal Model of Responsibilism, co-authored by Ol’ga Boytsova and Svetlana Khmelevskaya, attempts to comprehend the justification of epistemic authority in the liberal model of responsibilism. Authors try to determine the heuristic potential of the argumentation proposed within its framework and show the problem fields promising for conceptualizing epistemological authority. Further authors reveal the model's advantages, trying to explain the mechanism of authority's action, identify how authorities are ranked in the case of their competitive interaction, to highlight the grounds for subordination to authority on the part of an individual. The article by Andrey Zheleznov  explores the notion of ​​morality in experimental moral philosophy. The author emphasizes that experimental moral philosophy shows morality as a striving for a good that surpasses any given experience.To prove this statement, he discusses several studies that share a methodological paradigm that involves the use of natural and social sciences methods to study the content and mechanisms of the functioning of morality. Also, he focuses not on the discussion about the direct results of experimental research but on the debate on the attitude to morality, which manifests itself in such studies indirectly. Yelena Kosilova, in her article Conceptualization of the Absurd in Philosophy: From Logic to Logic of Sense, considers the question of what the absurd is. Her interest is what understandings and conceptualizations of the absurd can be found in the history of philosophy. It shows that, in the first approximation, absurdity exists in two forms — semantic and existential, where semantic absurdity is interpreted as a characteristic of the statement and existential as a characteristic of human existence. The article by Konstantin Dushenko, entitled The Concept of “Russophobia” among Russian Authors of the 19–20th Centuries, pays special attention to the linguistic and conceptual aspects of the phenomenon under study. The author examines the term “Russophobia” and the context in which this term was used. Aleksandr Markov devotes his article Contemporary Russian Poetry in the Period of Intense Events to an analysis of the changes that have taken place in Russian poetry over the past six months, starting from the 24 of February. He analyzes the influence of being inside the intensive development of events on contemporary Russian poetry as a set of institutions for producing and consuming texts. Also, he proves that under such an impact of events, not only individual ways of existence of texts change, but also the very meaning of the media and social contexts of the existence of poetry. Poetry turns out to be an area not so much of understanding the current reality but of differentiating the very methods of expression representing modernity. Finally, Aleksandr Mel’nikov, in the study  Concerning the Problems of Applicability of Speech Acts Theory in Free Speech Discussions: On Some Examples of John Austin, draws attention to the classical concept of speech acts developed by J. Austin. He emphasizes that the theory of speech acts, effectively linking the utterance with the action, is not applicable in practice as extensively as one might expect. Moreover, he seeks to reveal the boundaries of the convergence of utterance and action in the example of J. Austin's canonical lectures.

The issue continues with the section Publications and Translations, in which the translation of the classic article by Hans Blumenberg Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik als philosophiscmhes Problem is published. The translation was made by student-philosophers Kirill Bodenko, Petr Zelensky, and Petr Filatov under the guidance and editing of Alexander Mikhailovsky and provided with his introductory article.

Book reviews by Elena Besschetnova, Anton Kulikov, Vladimir Bliznekov, and Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina culminate the issue.

Alexander Mikhailovsky and Konstanin A. Pavlov-Pinus
Executive editors of the issue