Debates on Narodnost in Russian Intellectual Culture: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (“Round Table” Materials)

Abstract

In November 2024, a “round-table” was held on the topic: “Debates on Narod­nost in Russian Intellectual Culture: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”. The discus­sion was initiated by the journal Voprosy Filosofii and by representatives of the research project No. 24-18-00651, “The Ontology of the Nation in Rus­sian Neo-Kantianism”, carried out at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal Uni­versity and supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Leading domestic philosophers-epistemologists, political scientists, ethnographers, historians of philosophy, and young researchers of Russian Neo-Kantianism took part in the discussion. At the center of their attention was one of the most important global issues – national identity, which has gained particular urgency in the first quarter of the 21st century, as evidenced by current political and social processes surrounding us (migration, interethnic conflicts, the rise of national chauvinism, the disappearance of peoples and languages, etc.). Participants were invited to examine the issues of nation-building from within the Russian philosophical tradition, in the context of debates on the uniqueness and self-identification of Russia. These debates have become a constitutive backbone and conceptual core of Russian philosophy, acquiring not so much a pragmatic as a cultural-his­torical significance. Speakers focused on the historical transformations of the concepts of “narodnost”, “nation”, and “ethnos”, and examined possible configu­rations of national identity formation in various cultures. Special attention was also given to interpretations of the “nation” in the socio-philosophical and philo­sophical-methodological concepts of Russian Neo-Kantians such as V.M. Khvos­tov, P.I. Novgorodtsev, A.L. Sakketti, and M.M. Rubinstein.