Karsavin

Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956).
Botz-Bornstein’s study takes up Sesemann’s idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson’s philosophy. Sesemann’s thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about dynamics and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger.
The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin.

Must a system of belief that promotes dialogue between a Christian church and other faiths necessarily take an ecumenical view of Christianity? It happens that in the 1920’s, among Russian émigrés living in France, there was a debate on Russian Orthodoxy’s relationship to other faiths, which was really part of a more temporal debate about Russia’s place in the world. On one side of the polemic was a group of mostly young, exiled academics and erstwhile political activists from various fields, many of whom went on to make noteworthy advances in their own disciplines, who became known as the “Eurasianists”. Members of this movement held that there could be no ecumenical communion with the Roman Catholic Church, interfaith dialogue within the Eurasian space, containing adherents to the Buddhist and Muslim faiths, is possible, natural, and desirable. The other side of the debate was represented by the outstanding exiled Russian personalist philosopher, and friend of Jacques Maritain, Nikolai Berdyaev. This paper will describe the debate and explore the question of whether a pluralist outlook need be a cosmopolitan one.

Il tema dell’unità di Dio è centrale nell’ambito degli studi dedicati all’ontologia trinitaria, intesa sia come argomento che come disciplina connessi con il tentativo di alcuni studiosi di ridisegnare le categorie e i concetti della metafisica/ontologia alla luce dell’intelligenza della rivelazione trinitaria di Dio in Gesù Cristo. Se l’ontologia trinitaria è caratterizzata da un simile sforzo, i suoi protagonisti non propongono una trattazione identica del tema in questione. Essa, infatti, ha dei risvolti ed esiti differenti che dipendono dalle differenze esistenti tra i modelli di ontologia trinitaria. L’Autore si limita a presentare le interpretazioni dell’unità di Dio elaborate da parte dei tre modelli: quello proposto dal teologo tedesco K. Hemmerle, quello sviluppato da alcuni filosofi e teologi russi (P.A. Florenskij, S.N. Bulgakov e L.P. Karsavin) e quello “genetico” del filosofo, saggista e poeta spagnolo F. Rielo Pardal. Pur nella differenza, tali interpretazioni possono offrire un apporto di grande rilievo al proseguo del dialogo tra filosofia e teologia e al coinvolgimento di entrambe nella costruzione di una società e di un mondo fraterni e solidali.

The subject of this paper is a specific form of cosmogony — the conception of cosmogonic objectivation, interpreted as a tragedy or cosmogonic fall. This conception is examined on the basis of the evidence furnished by two sets of materials: firstly, the original texts and paraphrases of the Valentinian Gnostics of the 2ⁿᵈ and 3ʳᵈ centuries AD (Irenaeus Adversus haereses, 1.1.1–1.1.10; Excerpta ex Theodoto, compiled by Clement of Alexandria; and The Gospel of Truth from the Nag Hammadi Library), and secondly, the writings of the Russian philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin and Nikolay Berdyaev. The research reveals a series of specific features common to both of these: in particular, the conception of cosmogonic objectivation appears to be connected with the doctrine of the absolute person’s fall, and with the motive of self-alienation.