Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko and the Traditions of Russian Philosophy. For the Anniversary

Abstract

In January 2024, Russian philosophical community celebrated the 90th anniver­sary of the birth of the famous Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy and science, Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko (1934–2021). Iskra Stepanovna Andreeva used to call her “Russian Diotima”, and Erikh Yurievich Solovyev called her an “incomparable interlocutor”. She had an amazing ability to speak simply, clearly, and historically substantively about complex subjects. Her works won­derfully combined subject’s depth, rationality of argumentation, relevance of the studied problems and existential insight into them. Her epistemological style turns out to be strikingly consonant with the Russian tradition of “positive phi­losophy”, which is based on the idea of concreteness, the aspiration to achieve a “single, internally connected, holistic, and concrete knowledge of reality”, as formulated by Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. This tradition also includes the philo­sophical concepts of Pamfil Danilovich Yurkevich, Princes Sergey Nikolaevich and Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin, and many oth­ers. The continuity of Piama Pavlovna’s epistemological style with the Russian intellectual tradition is also evidenced in the letter of Russian philosopher and bibliographer Pavel Khristoforovich Kananov (1883–1967), addresed to her (a drift dated 1966 was recently discovered in his archive). We assume that “im­provised lucubrations in the midnight hour” written by an “existentialist before existentialism” will make us think once again about the specifics of existential philosophy in Russia. This text is published below.