The End of the History of Russian Philosophy: The 2000s

Abstract

When we turn to contemporary histories of Russian philosophy from Russia, we see that in regards to content, they do not differ substantially from a good portion of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors. In histories from the 2000s, we again find a frequent focus on the religious tradition, with only a few histories addressing university philosophy in any substantial way. However, what sets the contemporary writing of the history of Russian philosophy apart is an astonishing increase in volume. This chapter addresses the historical boom in Russian philosophy, which began in the late 1980s/early 1990s and peaked in the 2000s. I argue that histories from this period are consistent with many structural and methodological traditions of the genre but that the sheer volume of opinions in the 2000s has led to a fragmentation of the discipline in the 2010s, both within Russian philosophy and among its external critics.