ДО ПИТАННЯ ПРО НАЦІОНАЛЬНУ ФІЛОСОФІЮ: АНТИЧНИЙ РАКУРС

Marina Volf

doi:10.22240/sent30.01.024

Authors

Marina Volf Philosophy and Law of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1458-0440

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22240/sent30.01.024

Keywords:

ancient philosophy, national philosophy, argumentation, early Ionian thinkers, Isocrates, Plato, Gorgias

Abstract

The idea of national philosophy is often expanded to ancient doctrines and problems. This is inappropriate but possible due to a number of clichés in contemporary understanding of philosophy, such as the reduction of philosophy to life experience and identification of philosophy with journalism and ideology. The author presents several arguments against these positions basing on various texts of early Ionian thinkers, Aristotle, Isocrates, Gorgias. Philosophy in Ancient Greece was understood as a critical practice of reasonable debates that implied a commitment to specific school or position and conscientious civil position of the philosopher. It was classic Greece where this understanding of philosophy formed as a combination of three conditions: citizen’s virtue → rhetorician’s persuasiveness → philosopher’s best knowledge (i.e., truth), that accompanied philosophy for the last 25 centuries. On that ground any discussion of national philosophy (Russian, Nenets, Bantu etc.) will be correct only if all of these conditions would be realized in any discourse, and this discourse would correspond to specific disciplinary features mentioned above.

Author Biography

Marina Volf, Philosophy and Law of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Doctor of Sciences in philosophy, assistant professor, head of the department of the history and philosophy of science in the Institute

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