Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a complete introduction to world philosophy. Its 2,000 plus entries range from the Presocratics, Ancient Egypt and early Chinese philosophy up to the present day, and across the world to include the philosophies of the West, the Arab world, India, East Asia, Latin America and Africa. Subject matter is broad ranging, from aesthetics to mathematics, from philosophy of religion to philosophy of science.

 

Entries fall into three broad types. First, lengthy entries provide introductions to major disciplines within philosophy (epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and so on) and major time periods and regions (ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, Indian and Tibetan philosophy and so on), defining the concepts, movements and topics and summing up the major positions and debates within each. Shorter entries, ranging from a few dozen words to several hundred, then describe more specific concepts in greater detail. Finally, biographical entries provide information on the life, work and thought of hundreds of the world’s philosophers, from household names like Plato and Confucius to others who, almost forgotten, none the less made important contributions.

 

Using this volume is simple. First, entries are arranged in strict alphabetical order. For biographical entries, we have chosen the main word in the subject’s surname: thus al-Farabi appears under F, not A. If you do not at first find an entry where you expect to see it, try looking again under another word: for example, ‘philosophy of mind’ appears here as ‘mind, philosophy of’.

 

A comprehensive index has also been provided with references and page numbers for thousands of words and names. For the reader wanting information on very specific subjects, the index may well be the best place to start.

 

Finally, there are cross-references within the text. The longer thematic entries described above contain a number of cross-references to other entries which may be relevant or provide further information. These appear within the text in small capitals, thus: Aquinas, Yoruba epistemology, and so on. Also, many of the shorter entries have at the end of the text one or two references to other relevant entries. Using these cross-references, the reader can follow various concepts and ideas through many entries, gaining fresh perspectives from each.

 

In general, suggestions for further reading have been kept to a minimum: such references as have been provided are by and large to introductory texts, most of which should be accessible through any major university or large public library. These references are intended for the use of the interested lay reader or student, not the academic specialist.

 

As its title suggests, this volume is a condensed version of the ten-volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For readers who find themselves interested in or captivated by a particular subject or person discussed in these pages, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy may well be the best place to turn next, as it has much greater depth of cross-referencing and extensive bibliographies (this work also should be available through most major libraries).

Routledge, 1999. – 1030 p.

ISBN 978-0415223645

 

NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT

 

Nietzsche’s thought had a massive influence on Russian literature and the arts, religious philosophy and political culture. His popularizers were writers, artists and political radicals who read his works through the prism of their own culture, highlighting the moral, psychological and mythopoetic aspects of his thought and their sociopolitical implications, and appropriating them for their own agendas. Literature addressed to a mass readership disseminated crude notions of a master morality and an amoral Superman.

 

Russians discovered Nietzsche in the early 1890s. His admirers regarded him as a proponent of self-fulfilment and an enemy of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Two of them, Dmitri Merezhkovskii (1865–1941) and Maksim Gor’kii (real name Aleksei Peshkov, 1868–1936), were the progenitors of the two main streams of Nietzsche appropriation – the religious and the secular. Merezhkovskii was the initiator of Russian Symbolism. In 1896 he began trying to reconcile Nietzsche and Christianity; this attempt led him to propound an apocalyptic Christianity in 1900 and to found the Religious-Philosophical Society of St Petersburg (1901–3, 1906–17). Its members, the so-called God-seekers, included artists and intellectuals who were also attracted to Nietzsche. As for Gor’kii, his early short stories featured vagrant protagonists who personified crude versions of the slave and the master morality. In 1895 Gor’kii began to dream of a Russian Superman who would lead the masses in a struggle for liberation and imbue them with respect for Man, which he always wrote with a capital letter. During the Revolution of 1905, he and Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875–1933), a Bolshevik admirer of Nietzsche, constructed a Marxist surrogate religion to inspire heroism and self-sacrifice. They believed, as did most Symbolists and some philosophers, that art could transform human consciousness.

 

New literary schools emerged after 1909. The Futurists exaggerated Nietzsche’s anti-rationalism, anti-historicism and cultural iconoclasm. The Acmeists propounded a non-tragic Apollonian Christianity and idealized classical antiquity and ‘world culture’. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Nietzsche was considered an ideologue of reaction and his books were removed from the People’s Libraries, but his ideas, not identified as such, continued to circulate and pervaded Soviet literature, the arts and political culture.

 

See also: RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE

 

Further reading