Mikhail Bakhtin

This chapter considers the religious and metaphysical sides of Bakhtin’s thought—what might be called his ‘theological anthropology’—in the context of his posthumous recuperation as a philosopher in and beyond his homeland. Just as he never considered himself a literary critic or an academic philosopher, so Bakhtin would have declined the label of religious thinker, doctrinally defined. But his worldview was constructed against the clichés of materialism and positivism that saturated the Soviet era, and a religious subtext can be shown to enrich his secular ideas of novelness, dialogue, and carnival. Focal points in this discussion are Bakhtin’s revisionist Kantianism, his distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, his kenotic Christology as part of a dialogic, dynamic personalism, his apophatic self–other relations, and his understanding of the graced virtues faith, hope, and love.

Charles Williams and T.S. Eliot: Friends and Rivals

Williams and Eliot were close in age and both worked in publishing as well having careers as poets and freelance writers. However, their backgrounds were very different: Williams came from humble origins and was not able to complete a university degree, whereas Eliot at first seemed to set to become an academic philosopher. They first met in the early 1930s, by which time Williams had been both confused and influenced by The Waste Land. Eliot started to read Williams's novels and was in turn greatly influenced by them. They became increasingly close until Williams's death in 1945. Eliot showed the greatest influence of Williams in his 1949 play The Cocktail Party. Their Christian sensibility had some important features in common and, in the end, Williams's concept of the Affirmative Way became a great influence on Eliot.

Academic and Peripatetic Views on Natural and Moderate Passions and a Case of Intertextuality in Plutarch

An example of intertextuality in Plutarch and Cicero shows the use of a common source stemming from the treatise On Grief of the Academic philosopher Crantor. The use made of this source in both authors reveals a line of reasoning advocating the natural character and utility of certain passions. The advocacy of the natural character of passions is further connected in both Plutarch and Cicero to the normative ideal of ‘moderation of passions’ (metriopatheia) and is contrasted to the Stoic ideal of ‘absence of passions’ (apatheia). This may be further linked to a Plutarchan hermeneutical approach which conflates Academic and Peripatetic ethical views for the sake of constructing an alternative to the Stoic approach towards the elimination of passions. This strategy, which has its starting point in passages in Cicero which draw on Antiochus, is indicative of the way Plutarch connected Platonic and Aristotelian/Peripatetic authority in the domain of ethics in order to answer to Stoic positions in ethics which he found unpalatable.

Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)

Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead.

Johnson, Samuel (1709–84)

Famous as a man of letters and lexicographer, Johnson was no formal academic philosopher – indeed he was suspicious of abstractions. His works perfectly embody the darker side of the eighteenth-century mind, with its distrust of theoretical reason and system-mongering, and a profound sensitivity to the imperfections of a human existence in which there was more to be endured than to be enjoyed.

Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)

Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead.

Solov’ëv, Vladimir Sergeevich (1853–1900)

It has been widely acknowledged that Vladimir Solov’ëv is the greatest Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century; his significance for Russian philosophy is often compared to the significance of Aleksandr Pushkin for Russian poetry. His first works marked the beginning of the revolt against positivism in Russian thought, followed by a revival of metaphysical idealism and culminating in the so-called Religious-Philosophical Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Unlike the Russian idealists of the Romantic epoch, Solov’ëv was a professional, systematic philosopher. He created the first all-round philosophical system in Russia and thus inaugurated the transition to the construction of systems in Russian philosophical thought. At the same time he remained faithful to the Russian intellectual tradition of reluctance to engage in purely theoretical problems; his ideal of ‘integrality’ postulated that theoretical philosophy be organically linked to religion and social practice. He saw himself not as an academic philosopher, but rather as a prophet, discovering the way to universal regeneration. One of the main themes of Solov’ëv’s philosophy of history was Russia’s mission in universal history. Owing to this he was interested in the ideas of the Slavophiles and, in the first period of his intellectual evolution, established close relations with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavic circle of Ivan Aksakov. He was close also to Dostoevskii, on whom he made a very deep impression. At the beginning of the 1880s he began to dissociate himself from the epigones of Slavophilism; his final break with them came in 1883, when he became a contributor to the liberal and Westernizing Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger). The main reason for this was the pro-Catholic tendency of his thought, which led him to believe that Russia had to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. In his view, this was a necessary condition of fulfilling Russia’s universal mission, defined as the unification of the Christian Churches and the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of God on earth. In the early 1890s Solov’ëv abandoned this utopian vision and concentrated on working out an autonomous ethic and a liberal philosophy of law. This reflected his optimistic faith in liberal progress and his confidence that even the secularization of ethics was essentially a part of the divine–human process of salvation. In the last year of his life, however, historiosophical optimism gave way to a pessimistic apocalypticism, as expressed in his philosophical dialogue Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (1900), and especially the ’Tale of the Antichrist’ appended to it.

Melanthios von Rhodos in Apollodors Chronik (P.Herc. 10 21, col. XXXI)

A new reading is offered of a passage from the Chronica of Apollodorus which is about the Academic philosopher Melanthius of Rhodes (P.Herc. 1021 col. XXXI,1–20). As well as smaller textual improvements, the new reconstruction of the text shows in particular that the Academic was able to enjoy great wealth and preferred to pursue his studies in Athens.

SCEPTICISM AT THE BIRTH OF SATIRE: CARNEADES IN LUCILIUS’CONCILIVM DEORVM

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic.Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment,in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat(‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’,Sat.1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessorgarrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem(‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus.