Semyon Frank

Semyon Liudvigovich Frank was a proponent of ‘all-unity’, who sought to overcome the polarities in modern thought through a universal philosophical synthesis. Jewish by background, he was drawn to Marxism in his youth; but after some involvement in politics he grew disenchanted with the revolutionary movement. After 1905, he embarked on a career as a professional philosopher. He converted to Orthodoxy in 1912. Following deportation from Russia in 1922 he lived in Germany, France, and Britain. His main works of religious philosophy were written in emigration, although his underlying philosophical outlook was formed before the revolution. Most of the main themes in Christian theology were addressed in his work, even though theology was not his primary focus. Ontological questions were his main preoccupation. He saw his ideas as belonging to the Platonist tradition. His thinking was antinomian; following Nicholas of Cusa, he sought to demonstrate the ‘coincidence of opposites’. There was an apophatic tendency in his work, as well as an experiential emphasis. He saw evil as a kind of non-existent reality. He rejected charges of pantheism. There were echoes of Vladimir Soloviev’s thought in his writings, but this similarity only became clear to him after his philosophical system was formed. His outlook on the church was ecumenical, although he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. His social philosophy was personalistic and his political thought gradualist; he advocated a kind of Christian realism or humanism while warning against utopianism.

Goethe and Hegel: The Tninker’s Integrity and the Philosopher’s Systematicity

The article discusses the main elements of Goethe’s spiritual influence on Hegel’s philosophical constructions and the influence of the Hegelian system on Goethe’s whole worldview. The views of Goethe and Hegel on history, nature, free human spirit and philosophy itself, as the basis of productive human culture, largely coincided genetically from a single temporal and sociocultural flow. The relations between Goethe and Hegel make it possible to distinguish between the notions of “philosopher” and “thinker”: the so-called “professional” philosopher has a tendency towards systematicity, and with a thinker the systematism develops into integrity.

The Philosophical Personality

The authors adopt a critico‐sociological methodology to investigate the current state of the philosophical profession. According to them, the question concerning the status of philosophy (“What is philosophy?”) cannot be answered from within the precinct of philosophical reason alone, since philosophy—understood primarily as a profession—is marked by a constitutive type of self‐ignorance that prevents it from reflecting upon its own sociological conditions of actuality. This ignorance, which is both cause and effect of the organization and investment of philosophical desire, causes philosophers to lose themselves in an ideological myth (“the philosopher as idea(l)”) according to which philosophers are unaffected by the material conditions in which they exist. This myth prevents philosophers from noticing the extent to which their activity is influenced by extra‐philosophical determinants that shape, empirically, who becomes a professional philosopher (“the philosopher as imago”) and who doesn't. This article explores the relationship between philosophy's “idea(l)” and its “imago” as a way of shedding light on some of the mechanisms that make philosophy inhospitable for so many women, people of color, and economic minorities.

Dark Light: The Mystical Theology of St. Edith Stein

In this article, I will examine St. Edith Stein’s theory of religious language. Stein, who was both a professional philosopher and a mystic, and deeply rooted both in the tradition of negative theology and early phenomenology, held a peculiar version of univocity with regard to religious language. On the one hand, our concepts have something objectively in common with the thing they signify. On the other hand, our concepts are merely representations of the real. Therefore, when mystics say that God can be addressed “without words or images,” this does not entail anti-realism or non-cognitivism. Instead, according to Stein, this only means that words are not needed when the thing itself is present without mediation in the mystical experience.

Hume’s Life and Works

This summary account of Hume’s life and works challenges the usual way of telling the story of Hume’s career. It is generally believed that what Hume most wanted to be was a philosopher and that Hume turned to politics and history because that desire was frustrated, principally by the reputation for atheism he had acquired as a result of his writings on religion. The author argues that, from the beginning, Hume was as interested in politics as he was in philosophy; that a career as an independent man of letters, and not as a professional philosopher, was what he most wanted; and that that career was a success, with the History of England its triumphant culmination. Hume’s religious skepticism was no obstacle to his living the life that he most wanted to live, the life of a sophisticated and widely respected citizen of the European republic of letters.

Can There Be Such a Thing as Ethical Expertise?

Ethics in the 21st century is threatened by a split between practical philosophy as a full-blown academic discipline and applied ethics as pragmatic problem-solving inside the political process. The place of the professional philosopher sitting on medical and other 'ethics committees' as an 'ethical expert' is somewhere in between. But where exactly? How is his role defined? Is the expertise he brings to bear on practical decisions of a purely technical or of a substantially moral kind? These issues are discussed both 'from the outside' and 'from the inside'. First, some of the theoretical controversies surrounding 'ethical expertise' are discussed on the background of a rapidly growing literature in the field. These are then related to the realities of commission work as they confront the academic ethicist in practice.

Mary Warnock

Plato's view that we should be ruled by philosophers has never really caught on in Britain. Indeed, in recent years, political attitudes to the study of philosophy have resulted in the closure of departments of philosophy in our universities, so that the subject is less studied at undergraduate level than it was 20 or 30 years ago. So it is surprising that the way our generation thinks about education, genetic experimentation, broadcasting, and some of the other most contentious issues of our time should have been so influenced by a professional philosopher whose working life has never taken her out of Oxford and Cambridge.Mary Warnock has served as chairman of government committees on special education, on animal experimentation, on human fertilisation, and on teaching quality. Further, the recommendations of the committees she has chaired have usually been rapidly adopted by the government of the time and then translated into legislation with bipartisan support and considerable speed. The fate of her reports firmly refutes the commonly held view that governments set up committees to avoid making difficult decisions and then leave their weighty conclusions to sit on shelves, gathering dust until the topics in question have lost the interest of the public.

Ayer's Place in the History of Philosophy

When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell's Sceptical Essays (Russell, 1928), which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Principia Ethica (Moore, 1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell's Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell's successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.

Interpreting Leamer

It is easy for a professional philosopher who reads Learner's essay “Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics” to find a great deal in it that seems contentious, cavalier, or objectionable. Philosophers may even be puzzled as to what the fuss is all about. My guess is that the sorts of complaints philosophical readers are likely to make about Learner's paper are more the result of style than substance. The substance is very important.