Reading Russian Philosophy in the Age of Putin: Religion, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law

The third part of the lecture series, “Reading Russian Philosophy in the Age of Putin,” offered contemporary readings on religion and human rights topics. In the afternoon session, the two speakers considered the official rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox Church on the Russo-Ukrainian War. They looked closely and critiqued some of the positions of the Church, frequently identified with the pronouncements of Patriarch Kirill, which make intentional associations with a long intellectual tradition of Eastern Orthodox and Russian thought. The evening lecture considered the contemporary demise of a nineteenth-century Russian intellectual tradition of human dignity and human rights.

Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine, has been the site of the fiercest fighting in Russia’s naked war of aggression against the country. It is now not only a symbol of the Ukrainian people’s heroic resistance but also of the Kremlin’s contempt for the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual tradition of human dignity and human rights: Bakhmut is the birthplace of one of Russia’s great philosophers of law, Pavel Novgorodtsev (1866–1924). Novgorodtsev believed that the rule of law depended fundamentally on respect for human dignity, or on the intrinsic and absolute worth of the human person. For him, human dignity was the source of human rights—their protection being the basic purpose of the rule of law. Human dignity was also one of the grounds of Novgordtsev’s Orthodox faith. He believed that the absolute worth of the human person, and more generally human consciousness of what he called the absolute ideal, entailed the metaphysical or ontological reality of the Absolute or of God. This lecture explored the robust Russian religious-philosophical tradition of human dignity and human rights, focusing on Novgorodtsev’s philosophy of law. It also addressed Patriarch Kirill’s shameful renunciation of this rich intellectual and spiritual tradition.

Randall Poole, Professor of Intellectual History at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota.

Serguei Oushakine, Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, moderated the evening session.

Видео Reading Russian Philosophy in the Age of Putin: Religion, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law канала IWMVienna