Russia's Plato

Frances Nethercott

Introduction; The development of Plato scholarship in 19th century Russia: From an ’orthodox ethics’ to the pragmatism of reform and counter reform; Compromise and conflict: the scientific community and the State; Developments in the historical and philosophical sciences: i.History of philosophy, ii.Trends in historiography; Russian Plato scholarship: The ’Plato question’; Plato and Russian idealism: the Platonic impulse in the construction of a philosophical tradition; From ’integral knowledge’ to the ’ideal real’: the Slavophiles and their successors; Plato, the ’father of idealism’: i.’On the necessity and possibility of new principles in philosophy’ (Ivan Kireevskii); ii.’Concrete idealism’, (Sergei Trubetskoi); Plato as a contemporary of Kant: i.Kant and Plato in the theological academy; ii.Plato and Kant: the ’plus’ and ’minus’ in the European Philosophical tradition, (Pavel Florenskii); iii.Plato’s doctrine of reason versus Kant’s theory of experience, (Pamfil Iurkevich); iv.The neo-Kantian recovery of Plato; Plato as an impulse in Russian philosophy of law: Reforming justice in late imperial Russia; Teaching justice: between western science and domestic needs; Past philosophies for a contemporary science of law: Plato and Kant as two paradigms in juridical thought; i.Plato as a philosopher of natural law/justice; ii.Plato and/or Kant: duty versus the good; iii.Justifiying the common good: from subjective to objective ethics; iv.Between Plato and Kant; Law, society and the State; Russian liberalism: nostalgia for the ideal city?; Russians reading the Republic: Teaching the Republic; Interpreting the Republic; Confronting Western scholarship: ’classical’ versus ’modernizing’ trends; The actuality of the Republic: education and the woman question; i.Plato, the teacher (Nastoiashchii Uchitel’); ii.Sexual equality, solidarity, or a ’stud farm’;? A question of Utopia-nism; i.Terrestrial Utopia; ii.Dis