Philosophy Unchained

Delivery time	Delivery time 2-3 working days.
Edited by	Mykhailo Minakov
Foreword by	Christopher Donohue
Contributions by	Yevgeiy Abdullaev , Viktoras Bachmetjevas , Alexandru Cosmescu , Denys Kiryukhin , Giorgi Khuroshvili , Maija Kule , Mikhail Maiatsky , Mikhail Minakov , Tatyana Shchyttsova
Number of Pages	376
Type	E-Book
Language	English
Publication date	23.01.2023
e-book DRM	Digital Rights Management - Watermark
E-book format	EPUB
ISBN	978-3-8382-9768-2
Product safety information (EU GPSR)	read more

This book is a long-needed assessment of the transformations of philosophy after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a wide range of possibilities opened up for philosophical thinking, from honest participation in the rational discourse to voluntary subordination to predefined values, from global discussions on common human ground to violent nationalism. Here the reader finds a very accurate, impressively documented, and multifaceted picture of the paths taken by different philosophers in different countries, which helps to understand East European and Northern Eurasian context and, at the same time, addresses problems that trouble liberal democracies all over the world.

—Daniela Steila, University of Turin
By describing the state of philosophy in different post-Soviet countries in the last thirty years, Mikhail Minakov’s edited volume has managed to convey the complexity of each nation’s attempt to find its own comple political and cultural path well beyond the development of the discipline. The key questions that emerge are likely to remain relevant for decades to come, especially in the aftermath of the February 24th, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: the importance of pre-Soviet national traditions, the survival in Aesopian or clandestine terms of vital critical traditions throughout the Soviet era, the long-term importance of the post-1990 break, the tension between embracers of universal philosophical categories (sometimes as anti-political escape models) and the supporters of national ethnic, linguistic, and religious traditions. In this fraught geographical space, some countries are losers and others relative winners with philosophy as a seismograph echoing their previous histories, the strength of their civil societies both before and during the Soviet period, and their current geopolitical choices. Despite an often tedious listing of each country’s philosophical institutes and philosophers, this book offers an excellent handle with which to grasp the inherent difficulty of reconciling states, civil societies, and academic knowledge in fraught national settings.

—Diana Pinto, Historian
Nothing can help us more incisively than this book to grasp how thinking, though imperceptible and immaterial, can be put and kept in chains or can suddenly break free from chains. Covering an area as vast as Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, the authors guide us through the multiple, entwining paths that led former Marxist doctrine, congealed over half a century into an ideology policed by state power, to give way to cynical conformism or deep-seated anti-Western tropes that target individualism, rights, cosmopolitanism, democracy. Philosophy Unchained is an indispensable reading for anyone interested in grasping the lines of rupture and deep continuity between some former anti-Marxist oppositional intellectual themes and their ripening into a conservative anti-individualist and anti-Western creed that identifies liberal democracy as the enemy and, embraced and brandished by governing elites, has recently generated world-reshaping violence.

—Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome Tor Vergata
The book offers new and original cartography of the post-Soviet intellectual space and its development. A great merit of the book is the pluralization of the image of philosophy in the former Soviet Union: It is neither a “view from Moscow” nor a “view from outside,” but an analysis of different ways out of the Soviet ideological system, each with its own issues, losses, and new horizons.

—Nikolaj Plotnikov, Ruhr-University Bochum
The Soviet Union was meant to be philosophically embodied. People were reading Soviet philosophy in order to get insight into the Soviet project. But what happened to philosophy in Soviet hands when the Soviet Union faded away? The answer is in this volume. 

—Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia
This volume combines a collection of essays that provide a meticulous and honest analysis of post-Soviet philosophical thought. It discloses its problematic character, its internal ruptures with itself, and its possibility in its impossibility. The book is a must-read not only for those who are interested in a deep understanding of post-Soviet philosophy, its history, and its place in the world but also for those who want to truly explore the inner side of post-Soviet being and consciousness.

—Julie Reshe, University College Cork and University College Dublin
During the long decades of the Cold War, philosophy in the Communist Eastern Europe was dismissed as a tool of state ideology. Apart from a couple of dissidents (like Patocka in the Czech Republic), it was simply not taken seriously, and even the rare dissidents were treated in a patronizing way. So what happened after the fall of the Wall? The book provides an honest and detailed account of the renewal of authentic philosophical thought there, and the result is mixed. What arouses hope are a few names which do not only try to catch-up with the latest Western trends or to resuscitate old pre-Communist conservativism — they use the unique historical experience of their countries to cast a critical glance also at the illusions and crises of our global world, the West included. It is this overview of the new critical potentials in the post-Communist East that makes the book an obligatory reading for all who care about our common destiny.

—Slavoj Žižek, University of London/University of Ljubljana