Cover Osteuropa 7-10/2015

In Osteuropa 7-10/2015

A Philosophy of Freedom
Merab Mamardashvili and the Metaphysics of the Agora

Michail Ryklin


Deutsche Fassung

Abstract

Merab Mamardashvili was a principled opponent of state ideologies. His Moscow seminars in the 1960s and 1970s were a place for diversity of opinion and free speech. There, the philosopher, a native of Gori, Georgia, whom the Soviet Union kept from traveling for 20 years, entered into dialogue with Plato, Kant, and Descartes. With that, he gave metaphysics a Russian language. As state repression receded in the 1980s and change moved within reach, the political significance of Mamardashvili’s philosophy became obvious.

(Osteuropa 7-10/2015, pp. 631–642)