Research in philosophy, humanities and social sciences, including studies that analyse and critically assess contemporary problems

Many influential policy and security experts and politicians have voiced fundamentally different judgments about whether Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine should be called ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, without clarifying their assumptions, however. Using this case, I discuss general conditions for determining such rationality assessments. The question is more complex than common debates assume, due to the fragmentation of the concept of rationality. After careful analysis of the major views of rationality in philosophy and the social sciences - including the impact of rationalization, of biases, and of competing normative standards of rationality - I show that there are clear and defensible assumptions to be made. As I argue, Putin’s decision was subjectively instrumentally rational, including many aspects of calculation and reasoning. At the same time, it was not objectively instrumentally rational:  right from the start, he had numerous mistaken beliefs and desires and used flawed collective deliberation procedures. Such rationality assessments can be made without the benefit of hindsight, and without questionable mind-reading from a distance; most of them also do not require considering whether Putin’s decisions and actions are morally rational. This type of rationality analysis should be useful for decision-makers in politics and for negotiations, in this case as well as in others. I will also discuss how this analysis relates to discussions over „realism" versus „liberalism“ in international relations and political science.

17, rue de la Sorbonne 75005 Paris
Séminaire organisé par Dr. Prof. Yulia Sineokaya

Philosophical instruments in the analysis of contemporary challenges

Since the Enlightenment, with its famous debate on philosophia popularis, philosophy has been confronted several times with the question of its use for a broad audience and its ability to provide answers to contemporary challenges. Can this kind of ‘popular’ philosophy retain its systematic character, or should it methodologically reinvent itself to solve specific problems? From today’s perspective, this question looks more relevant than ever, given the complexity of problems presented by the political, economic and existential crises that threaten the stability of democratic structures and cause rapid social changes.

Our seminar aims, on one side, to apply philosophical instruments to the analysis of contemporary interdisciplinary problems in a broad field, from recent and ongoing social and political developments to scientific discoveries and cultural trends, and, on the other side, to study the phenomena of the modern world in the context of the history of philosophy. This goal is also an attempt to answer the growing criticism that contemporary philosophy is primarily interested in abstract problems detached from real-life issues. Many of our topics are associated with Russia, as the events since February 2022 have significantly influenced the international political and intellectual landscape.


2023

25 septembre, 18:00–20:00
Dr. Dr. Alexey Zhavoronkov (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Russia’s ‘New conservatism’ as Pseudo-Conservatism


23 octobre, 18:00–20:00
Dr. Prof. Evert van der Zweerde (Radboud University)
Political Philosophy in Russia – Incurable Imperial Mindset?


20 novembre, 18:00–20:00
Dr. Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky (Collège des Bernardins)
Avec le retour de la guerre en Europe le nécessaire dépassement de l’amnésie occidentale et les voies possibles de jugement des crimes du communisme

Dr. Yurii Latysh (European Humanities University of Vilnius)
Ukraine's Memory Politics during the War


11 décembre, 18:00–20:00
Dr. Prof. Thomas Sturm (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Rationality and irrationality in politics: Putin and the war in Ukraine

Studying and analyzing political philosophy in Russia is not a simple task. It is, to an extent, an exercise in Comparative Political Philosophy, but only to an extent, or “half”, as Russian philosophy obviously has largely the same roots as its West-European counterpart: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Christianity, Enlightenment, German Idealism, and, not to forget, Marxism. The Russian and the West-European philosophical traditions are, in many respects, each other’s inside constitutive other, so are we dealing with a comparison between philosophical cultures or within a shared European one? Moreover, and more importantly, we should address the question of political philosophy “as such”: if all forms of human society have a political dimension, we may want to look for a common basis of all manifestations of political philosophy, wherever and in whichever form they occur. From this angle, the very title of a book called Russian Political Philosophy can be contested by asking if it should not rather be called Political Philosophy in Russia. Even book titles have a political (as well as a commercial) dimension.

Against the background of these questions, I will address three further notions that seem to set the stakes of the discussion: anarchy, authority, autocracy. This “triple A” suggests a specificity (rather than a uniqueness) of political-philosophical thought in Russia and in Russian (with the additional, far from obvious question: where to find it? partly in odd places…). The latter part of this sentence, however, raised new questions, that have become, arguably, more pressing than they ever were as a result of the current military conflict in Ukraine that some will describe as “Russia’s War” while others persist in calling it “Special Military Operation” - turning contemporary Russian society into a “special operation” in the process. Is a neutral, distanced approach possible in this case? While we always should seek nuance and perspective, we cannot, nor should we abstain from judging, nor can we avoid the question how to assess the current conflict, which can be described, alternatively but not mutually exclusively, as a clash between civilizations, as a geopolitical conflict between two of several large blocks -Schmittian Großräume [large spaces]- in a multipolar world, or as part of the yet-not-processed Russian as well as Soviet past – the total absence of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past], which not accidentally is a German word.

Presupposing, despite all differences, continuity rather than rupture when it comes to the Tsarist Russian Empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the present-day Russian Federation, we need to address the question if and how the current situation is nourished and / or legitimized by important strands and concepts in the tradition of political-philosophical thinking in Russia / Soviet Union. While, again, simplification must be avoided, we can identity, I will suggest, a specific dynamics of, on the one hand, an imperial and, by implication, Russo-Centric logic that comes in two variants, a belligerent and a benevolent (and paternalistic) one, and, on the other hand, an anti-colonial and, by implication, plural logic than emphasizes national identity and, politically, sovereignty and self-determination. This dynamics can then, finally, be tied back to the concepts of “empire” and “nation-state” as the two main alternative models of political modernity, both standing in opposition to alternatives that challenge the very notion of “statehood”. The specificity, albeit not uniqueness, of the Russian case would then be the historical fact of an expanding empire that incorporates, by whatever means, its blizhnеe zarubezh’e rather than establishing a colonial empire with overseas colonies.

One of the very few good things about the current military conflict in Ukraine is that it forces us to readdress, reassess and reinvestigate the anyway complicated reality of Russian political philosophy.

Antoine Arjakovsky, Doctor of History, Director of Research at the Collège des Bernardins

We know that failure to judge the crimes of the communist past leads to their justification and then their repetition. Kholodomor, the cold genocide carried out by Russia against Ukraine in the winter of 2022-2023, a population of more than 40 million, is the tragic repetition of Kholodomor, the hunger genocide to which committed, on Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union to crush independent Ukraine, a crime against humanity which left more than 5 million dead.

Similarly, while at the beginning of the 21st century China was believed to respect international law, in 2013, President Xi Jinping called for "methodically carrying out external propaganda work" and "better telling China's story and making hear the voice of China.” Ten years later, on November 21, 2023, Lu Shaye, Chinese ambassador to France, denied on LCI the sovereignty of the countries resulting from the Soviet Union. The countries of the former USSR "do not have effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to concretize their status as sovereign countries", he declared in particular. The Chinese ambassador also questioned Crimea's belonging to Ukraine, a territory that Russia has occupied since 2014. "It depends on how we perceive this problem," he said. "There is History. Crimea was, at the very beginning, Russia's. It was Khrushchev who offered Crimea to Ukraine during the time of the Soviet Union." For the Chinese diplomat, we must stop “quibbling” over the question of post-Soviet borders.

To escape from amnesia on the one hand and propaganda on the other, it is necessary to rehabilitate authentic history, based in metaphysics, capable of showing the truth, of bringing out a therapeutic story, capable of deeply healing the wounded memories, resentments and desires for revenge. During this brief intervention, we propose firstly to bring to light the reality of the memorial conflict at the root of the current war between Russia and Ukraine. Then we will recall certain attempts to judge the crimes of communism, notably that of Vladimir Bukovsky, and we will briefly present the proposal of the Russian historian Nikolai Epplee for the democratization of the work of historical justice. Finally we will insist on the fact that, as Nicolas Berdyaev had already noticed who compared the 3rd communist international to the Third Imperial Rome, communist mythology is itself linked to imperialist mythology on a historical level but also on a metaphysical level. It is only by purifying imperial political theology that we will be able to free ourselves from the demons that haunt Russian consciousness and, beyond that, European consciousness.

As part of the regular online seminar of the Association, Victor Malakhov presented a presentation entitled: "A parallel world (about the Kyiv philosophical circle of the last third of the twentieth century)". There were 26 people present.