The Guardian of the History of Philosophy: On Nelly Motroschilova’s Philosophical Beginnings

Abstract

Six decades of N.V. Motroshilova’s active creative work were commonly asso­ciated with her work as a historian of philosophy. Although this view is largely fair and is confirmed by the way Motroshilova herself assessed her research, the philosopher’s range of interests was much wider: it covered problems of West­ern European history, the theory of culture and civilization. The article shows the formation of Motroshilova’s philosophical specialization which began as an interest in German philosophy, initially limited to Husserl’s phenomenology. However, already in the early 1960s the discussion of phenomenological prob­lems was clearly placed in the context of social analysis and was commonly identified with sociology. At the same time, another perspective was outlined: consideration of the problems of Western philosophy from the point of view of the most universal problems of the theory of knowledge. Social analysis as the dominant direction of Motroshilova’s research remained until the end of the 1970s, while the thematic area of this analysis gradually expanded – first to the philosophy of the New Age, subsequently to German idealism (the philos­ophy of Hegel and then Kant), as well as to the origins of Western European phi­losophy in Greek antiquity. Simultaneously with this expansion, and largely due to it, the general philosophical methodology also changed: starting from the 1990s, the study of the history of ideas in the aspect of culture and civiliza­tion is used as a general approach to the history of ideas. The parallel thematic and methodological “universalization” helps N.V. Motroshilova to implement a number of extremely important scientific and organizational projects for Rus­sian philosophy, three of them occupy a special place: History of Philosophy Yearbook, the first Russian periodic edition, entirely focused on the history of philosophy; preparation and publication of a new textbook History of Philoso­phy. West – Russia – East, as well as a new edition of the main works of Im­manuel Kant.