Diana Dukhanova
Christoph Schneider
Clemena Antonova
Tuesday, 17 January 2023, 16:00 CET
SPITTELAUER LÄNDE 3, IWM Library, VIENNA, 1090
Some academics and popular commentators have argued that we have entered a post-truth era. Has the loss of a metaphysical conception of truth also undermined our ability to recognize ‘factual truths’ of everyday life? Drawing on the Russian religious thinker Pavel Florensky, Christoph Schneider shall give an outline of a notion of truth that avoids the shortcomings of both modernity and postmodernity. Florensky’s starting point is epistemology and he argues that Enlightenment approaches like empiricism, rationalism, and Kantianism cannot serve as the foundation for a philosophically convincing idea of truth. His labyrinthine argument then leads the reader, via radical scepticism, to existential questions, and finally to a notion of truth that integrates temporal contingency and synchronic difference – ideas that later came to dominate postmodern philosophy. Yet Florensky does not embrace relativism, fideism, and perspectivism, but articulates a Trinitarian, personalist idea of Truth that entails its own, ‘higher form’ of rationality.
Vasily V. Rozanov (1856-1919) and Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), both prominent and controversial figures in the Russian Religious Renaissance, maintained a years-long correspondence starting in 1908 and lasting until Rozanov’s death. Their letters show the evolution of a complex intellectual and personal friendship between Father Florensky and Rozanov, who was accused throughout his lifetime of apostasy from the Russian Orthodox Church, revealing deep and often unexpected commonalities in their theology, philosophy, and social views particularly as it concerns marriage and family. Sharing messianic visions of holy Russia and fears about the decline of the Russian family, the two thinkers devoted a significant portion of their letters to the discussion of one of Rozanov’s key concerns: the role of the Jews in Russian history and society and their alleged contribution to the decline of Russian civilization, as well as the instructive elements of their family lives as examples of national self-preservation. This presentation will explore the role of antisemitism and Judeophilia in Rozanov and Florensky’s correspondence, linking it to the wider role of antisemitism in historical and contemporary Russian messianism.
Diana Dukhanova is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in the US.
Christoph Schneider is the Academic Director at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge.
Clemena Antonova, Research Director at the IWM - The World in Pieces.
