The First Century of Getting Used to Kant's Ideas in Russian Universities

Abstract

The research is based on a little-known essay by Evgeny Alexandrovich Bobrov (1867-1933), a philosopher and a remarkable representative of the Russian university professorship of the late XIX - first quarter of the XX centuries. The essay is based on a public report that Bobrov delivered at the celebrations at the Warsaw Imperial University dedicated to the centenary of Kant's death. In 1904, solemn meetings with speeches and philosophical discussions were held at Russian universities around this memorial date. The usual practice of that time was then to publish the texts of speeches in scientific journals and individual books, which provided access to the text to the general public. Thanks to this tradition, historians of philosophy have the opportunity to penetrate into the philosophical moods and thematic palette of that time around the name of Kant and his ideas. Our choice fell on the speech of E. A. Bobrov, because in his speech he shows for his listeners/readers a retrospective of the adaptation of Kant’s philosophy in the Russian universities community. Symbolically, the century after Kant’s death can rather be considered as the birth of Kantian in the Russian school of philosophy. The central part of our research is devoted to this retrospective, as it was analyzed by Russian philosophers in 1904. Who philosophers were considered supporters of Kant’s philosophy, and who stood in opposition. In the final part, we considered it appropriate to draw attention to the fact that Kantianism was actively developing in the next decade of 1904-1914. But the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 influenced the tone of philosophical discussions around Kant’s ideas. The topic of “overcoming Kantianism” becomes one of the directions in the criticism of Kant.

Keywords

• kantiana
• russian philosophy
• russian imperial universities
• university philosophical community
• kantiana
• the first world war