Skip to main content Accessibility help
×

Core Maintenance Message

This is a test maintenance message.

Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:28:38.292Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Semën Frank's expressivist humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

G. M. Hamburg
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College, California
Randall A. Poole
Affiliation:
College of St. Scholastica, Minnesota
Get access

Summary

To approach the philosophical thought of Semën Frank with a focus on his ideas concerning human dignity and self-realization is to view it from a perspective quite unlike the one from which it is generally viewed both in the standard histories of Russian philosophy and in recent Russian studies of his thought. The influential émigré historian Vasilii Zenkovskii, who considered Frank “the most outstanding among Russian philosophers generally,” saw him primarily as the creator of a system of metaphysics founded on the notion of the world as a total unity (vsëedinstvo). On the other hand, Piama Gaidenko, an acute contemporary Russian expositor of Frank, focused her attention on his epistemological theories, presenting him as a leading representative of the “turn to ontology,” i.e., epistemological realism, in early twentieth-century European philosophy. This approach links him with such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Martin Heidegger.

Without question, Frank's labors in the fields of metaphysics and theory of knowledge absorbed a large part of his energies as a philosopher, and called forth many of his most original insights. Yet I would maintain that Frank had no more compelling concern throughout his philosophical career than to vindicate a view of the human person as the earthly receptacle of divine spirit, and hence as a being of infinite worth. The theme of human dignity and individual rights surfaces again and again in Frank's writings, from the inception of his public activity to its very end.

Type
Chapter
Information
A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930
Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity
, pp. 205 - 224
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×