Polemics and Popularisation: Aspects of Kant’s Early Reception in Russia

Abstract

The reception of Kant’s philosophy in Russia at the beginning of the 19th cen­tury was focused mainly on religious and ethical issues, although it did not ex­clude theoretical and cognitive questions. The search for textbooks that would adequately and at the same time comprehensibly introduce students and the edu­cated public to the basic ideas of the Kantian philosophical system led two
professors at Kazan University, Alexander S. Loubkin and Petr S. Kondyrev, to the textbook on philosophy for beginners by Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Snell, the German Kantian philosopher, pedagogue and populariser. The work they did in preparing the Russian edition of that textbook was not confined to translation, although the translation of the philosophical text itself required scrupulous termi­nological work, since there were as yet no equivalents for many philosophical terms in Russian. Each of the translators provided parts of the textbook with their own explanations and additions, with the parts on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion attracting the most interest and polemical objections. Loubkin’s criticism of Snell and thus in most cases of Kant concerns such key concepts and provisions of Kantian practical philosophy as practical reason, the end of moral acts, the distinction between thing and person, the categorical imperative, the feeling of respect for the moral law and others. The real stum­bling block for Loubkin was Kant’s solution to the problem of the relation be­tween religion and morality and his choice of a foundation for morality. Loubkin suggests that the moral is grounded in religion and proposes as the criterion of morality the correspondence of an act to the Divine Will.