Antinomy and Symbol: Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Discontinuity

Andrea Oppo, Ph.D. (1970), is Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Theological University of Sardinia. He is the author of several works, including Shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and Philosophy in Slavic Thought (ed.) (2013) and Lev Shestov: The Philosophy and Works of a Tragic Thinker (2020).

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

 1 What Is Florensky’s Philosophy?

 2 Conceptualizing Discontinuity: A Perfect Oxymoron

 3 Continuity: The Mainstay of the Western Scientific View

 4 Florensky’s Discontinuity: Antinomy and Symbol

1 Searching for Discontinuity: Florensky’s Pythagorean Mathematics

 1 The Moscow School of the Theory of Functions

 2 Between Function and Form: Florensky’s “Speculative Mathematics”

 3 Back to Pythagoras: Toward a “Mathematics Outside Mathematics”

2 Truth as Self-Contradiction: Platonic Influences and Philosophy of Knowledge

 1 From Mathematics to Theology: Florensky’s “Magic” Plato

 2 Plato’s “Idealism,” or the Antinomic Nature of Reason

 3 The Quest for “Praeambula Rationis”: The Fundamental Antinomy of Knowledge

3 The World of Antinomies: Between Theology and Logic

 1 Discovering the Kantian Antinomies

 2 “Tertium Datur”: The Way of Theological Reason

 3 The Ground of the Paradox: The Logic of Florensky’s Antinomies

4 Plato and Kant in Florensky’s Philosophy of History

 1 The Philosophical Foundation of History

 2 Plato vs. Kant: Resetting History

 3 The Middle Ages and the Renaissance as Categories of Thought

 4 Plato, Kant, and the Discontinuous Sense of the World

5 Concrete Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Nature

 1 Ways and Centers: The Concretization of Metaphysics

 2 From Antinomy to Symbol: The Boundary as a Philosophical Problem

 3 Symbolarium: True Knowledge as Form

6 Nature, Art, and Perspective: Pavel Florensky’s Aesthetic “Realism”

 1 Art in Reverse: A Theory of Multiple Spaces and Times

 2 The Symbolic Paradigm of Knowledge and True Realism

 3 The Role of the Symbol: Examples from Arts and Literature

 4 Conclusion: Art as a “Living Organism”

7 The Philosophy of Discontinuity as a Philosophy of the Name

 1 Language, Word, and Identity: Florensky’s Philosophy of Literature

 2 The Original Power of the Word

 3 The Palamitic Logic and Onomatodoxy

Conclusion: Toward a “Scientific Neoplatonism”

Bibliography

Index