Personalism

Russian philosophy is one of Europe’s great national traditions — and one of its most singular. It was born late, in the nineteenth century, and not in the academic, systematic mold that shaped Germany from Kant to Hegel, but interwoven with literature, theology, and political urgency. Its central problems are not primarily epistemological but existential and ethical: the meaning of history, Russia’s destiny between East and West, human freedom in the face of evil, the possibility of a just community. It is no accident that its most influential philosophical texts include novels — those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — and essays written by exiles, prisoners, and priests. ...

Nikolai Berdiáev Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (18 March 1874, Kyiv — 24 March 1948, Clamart, France) was a Russian religious and political philosopher, often described as a “Christian existentialist.” Of aristocratic origin, he began as a Marxist — he was even internally exiled under the tsarist regime for his activities — but broke early with materialism toward idealism and Orthodoxy. He took part in the critical collection Vekhi (1909). Expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922, in the episode of the “philosophers’ ships,” he lived in Berlin and then in Clamart, near Paris, where he edited the journal Put and became the best-known voice of Russian thought in exile. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. ...