Alyssa DeBlasio

This project describes and evaluates the troubled state of philosophy in Russia in the post-Soviet decades, when Russia’s thinkers find themselves in transition between two incompatible definitions of philosophy: a nineteenth-century nationalist and religious view of Russian philosophy as essentially Russian, and a universal conception of philosophy as a profession without geographical or denominational allegiances. While the early 1990s saw the dramatic rise of philosophy publications in Russia, already by the mid-2000s that enthusiasm had given way to widespread pessimism regarding the state of the discipline, whereby Russia’s philosophers regularly denied the existence of Russian philosophy altogether. “The End of Russian Philosophy” argues that the Russian intellectual climate of the twenty-first century is identifiable by its preoccupation with the “end” of the nationalist narrative about Russian philosophy, as a new generation of scholars seeks to revive the discipline as a universal and professionalized practice.