Mikhail Epstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3624413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mikhail Epstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mikhail |
| FAMILY NAME | Epstein |
| SIGNATURE | EPSTEIN M |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Synthetic Turn
This essay calls for a synthetic turn in philosophy, moving beyond the emphasis in analytic philosophy on decomposition toward practices of problematization and constructive world-making. By examining definitions, judgments, ethical postulates, and disciplines, it demonstrates how synthesis expands conceptual horizons and generates new frameworks. In an era of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, philosophy had best evolve from analysis…
Why Russian Philosophy Is So Important and So Dangerous
The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest gener…
The Politics of Apocalypse
This guest column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self-definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation into an anti-world - a society whose purpose is to undermine and destroy. Emerging Russian cults of war, death, and apocalypticism are stressed, as are the paradoxes and inversions by…
To See Paris and Die
The Phoenix of Philosophy
This groundbreaking work by one of the world’s foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, h…
A Philosophy of the Possible
In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (the actual, possible, and necessary), as applied to the discourse of philosophy in its post-Kantian and especially post-Derridean perspectives. He relies on his own experience of living in the USSR and the US, dominated respectively by imperative and possibilist modalities. Possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its multiple possibil…
The Total Art of Stalinism
Book Review| April 01 2019 The Total Art of Stalinism: Avante-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond by Boris Groys Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avante-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Rougle, Charles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 176 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2019) 25 (1-3): 444–445. https://doi.org/10.1215/096…
Inventive Thinking in the Humanities
This essay's central concern is the need for a new, practical dimension in the humanities, emphasizing their constructive rather than purely scholarly aspects. An analysis is offered of various types of inventions in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, art, and literature, such as new disciplines, genres, cultural practices, and intellectual movements. An invention is not the production of a given work, however great, but rather a principle or…
The Nonhuman Turn
Book Review| September 01 2017 The Nonhuman Turn Grusin, Richard, ed., The Nonhuman Turn. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 255 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (3): 550. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3988492 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Nonhuman Tur…
Russian Postmodernism
Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of …
Lyrical Philosophy, or How to Sing with Mind
The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as (etymologically) love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many various feelings that we experience, there is a discrete group that, thanks to their involvement with universals, may be regarded as philosophical. Wonder, grief, compas…
Introduction
This essay, coauthored by the editor and a member of the editorial board of Common Knowledge, introduces the fifth installment of the journal's symposium "Fuzzy Studies," which is about the "consequence of blur." Beginning with a review of Enlightenment ideas about ideas - especially Descartes's argument that a mind "unclouded and attentive" can be "wholly freed from doubt" (Rules III, 5) - this essay then turns to assess the validity of counter-…
The Interesting
Research Article| June 01 2009 The Interesting Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2009) 18 (1): 75–88. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.18.1.75 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Interesting. Qui Parle 1 June 2009; 18 (1): 75–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.18.1.75 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager…
Transculture
A bstract This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerge…
The Whisperers
Book Review| August 01 2009 The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 740 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2009) 15 (3): 506–507. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2009-032 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Ci…
Between Humanity and Human Beings
Research Article| January 01 2007 Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolution of the Species Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2007) 13 (1): 18-32. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2006-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolu…
The Unasked Question
Research Article| January 01 2004 The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-42 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 42-60. doi: https://doi…
Chronocide
Research Article| April 01 2003 Chronocide: Prologue to the Resurrection of Time Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (2): 186-198. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-2-186 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; Chronocide: Prologue to the Resurrection of Time. Common Knowledge 1 April 2003; 9 (2): 186-198. doi: https…
Russian Postmodernism
Third Wave
A Draft Essay on Russian and Western Postmodernism
Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 2, January 1993
After the Future
Research Article| April 01 1991 After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1991) 90 (2): 409–444. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-90-2-409 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature. South …
Transculture
A bstract This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerge…
The Unasked Question
Research Article| January 01 2004 The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-42 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 42-60. doi: https://doi…
Third Wave
After the Future
Research Article| April 01 1991 After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1991) 90 (2): 409–444. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-90-2-409 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature. South …
A Draft Essay on Russian and Western Postmodernism
Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 2, January 1993
Third Wave
Russian Postmodernism
Chronocide
Research Article| April 01 2003 Chronocide: Prologue to the Resurrection of Time Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (2): 186-198. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-2-186 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; Chronocide: Prologue to the Resurrection of Time. Common Knowledge 1 April 2003; 9 (2): 186-198. doi: https…
The Unasked Question
Research Article| January 01 2004 The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-42 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 42-60. doi: https://doi…
Between Humanity and Human Beings
Research Article| January 01 2007 Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolution of the Species Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2007) 13 (1): 18-32. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2006-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolu…
The Interesting
Research Article| June 01 2009 The Interesting Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2009) 18 (1): 75–88. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.18.1.75 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Interesting. Qui Parle 1 June 2009; 18 (1): 75–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.18.1.75 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager…
Transculture
A bstract This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerge…
The Whisperers
Book Review| August 01 2009 The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 740 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2009) 15 (3): 506–507. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2009-032 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Ci…
Introduction
This essay, coauthored by the editor and a member of the editorial board of Common Knowledge, introduces the fifth installment of the journal's symposium "Fuzzy Studies," which is about the "consequence of blur." Beginning with a review of Enlightenment ideas about ideas - especially Descartes's argument that a mind "unclouded and attentive" can be "wholly freed from doubt" (Rules III, 5) - this essay then turns to assess the validity of counter-…
Lyrical Philosophy, or How to Sing with Mind
The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as (etymologically) love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many various feelings that we experience, there is a discrete group that, thanks to their involvement with universals, may be regarded as philosophical. Wonder, grief, compas…
Russian Postmodernism
Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of …
Inventive Thinking in the Humanities
This essay's central concern is the need for a new, practical dimension in the humanities, emphasizing their constructive rather than purely scholarly aspects. An analysis is offered of various types of inventions in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, art, and literature, such as new disciplines, genres, cultural practices, and intellectual movements. An invention is not the production of a given work, however great, but rather a principle or…
The Nonhuman Turn
Book Review| September 01 2017 The Nonhuman Turn Grusin, Richard, ed., The Nonhuman Turn. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 255 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (3): 550. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3988492 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikhail Epstein; The Nonhuman Tur…
The Phoenix of Philosophy
This groundbreaking work by one of the world’s foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, h…
A Philosophy of the Possible
In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (the actual, possible, and necessary), as applied to the discourse of philosophy in its post-Kantian and especially post-Derridean perspectives. He relies on his own experience of living in the USSR and the US, dominated respectively by imperative and possibilist modalities. Possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its multiple possibil…
The Total Art of Stalinism
Book Review| April 01 2019 The Total Art of Stalinism: Avante-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond by Boris Groys Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avante-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Rougle, Charles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 176 pp. Mikhail Epstein Mikhail Epstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2019) 25 (1-3): 444–445. https://doi.org/10.1215/096…
To See Paris and Die
Why Russian Philosophy Is So Important and So Dangerous
The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest gener…
The Politics of Apocalypse
This guest column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self-definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation into an anti-world - a society whose purpose is to undermine and destroy. Emerging Russian cults of war, death, and apocalypticism are stressed, as are the paradoxes and inversions by…
A Synthetic Turn
This essay calls for a synthetic turn in philosophy, moving beyond the emphasis in analytic philosophy on decomposition toward practices of problematization and constructive world-making. By examining definitions, judgments, ethical postulates, and disciplines, it demonstrates how synthesis expands conceptual horizons and generates new frameworks. In an era of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, philosophy had best evolve from analysis…
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