This book explores developments in the three major societies of the South Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia - focusing especially on religion, historical traditions, national consciousness, ...and political culture, and on how these factors interact. It outlines how, despite close geographical interlacement, common historical memories and inherited structures, the three countries have deep differences; and it discusses how development in all three nations has differed significantly from the countries' declared commitments to democratic orientation and European norms and values. The book also considers how external factors and international relations continue to impact on the three countries.
Abstract
Vladimir Solov'ëv, informal "founder" of the current of Russian religious philosophy which gained some prominence in the early 20th C with thinkers like N. Berdyaev, S. Frank and S. ...Bulgakov, based his social and political philosophy as well as his program of "Christian politics" (an attempt to bring the world as close to the Kingdom of God as possible, while steering clear from any idea of "building" God's Kingdom on Earth) on a series of personal mystical encounters with Sophia, understood by him as, simultaneously, Eternal Femininity, Divine Wisdom and World Soul. The paper argues that this vision remained the foundation of his entire world-view, despite the fact that he initially articulated a more "utopian" vision of a world-encompassing "free theocracy," while later in his career he elaborated, in Opravdanie dobra The Justification of the (Moral) Good, a more realistic, but still "ideal-theoretical" vision of a just Christian state. Highlighting the tension between Solov'ëv's advocacy of a free and plural sphere of public debate and his own "prophetic" position based on privileged access to divine wisdom, the paper ends with a discussion of the intrinsic and unsolvable tension between religion and politics, and with the claim that there is a fundamental opposition between holistic mystical visions and a recognition of the political, understood as the ubiquitous possibility of both conflict and concord among humans.
This article highlights some specificities of the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as of the later document on human rights, by comparing them in some key points ...with the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church as made public in the Compendium. The guiding hypothesis is that four specifically Orthodox theological principles - pomestnost', symphonia, sobornost' and bogochelovechestvo - are at work in the Social Concept and determine its distinctive character. A central aspect of these principles is their function to balance a dualism - of divinity and humanity, of collective and individual, of state and church, and of territoriality and universality. This article shows how these principles are at work in the Social Concept, how they are applied to contemporary secular and modern society, and how they determine the attitude of the ROC to contemporary problems, for example in the area of human engagement in nature, economy, civil society, human rights, politics, war and bioethics. First and foremost, the Social Concept is a Christian social doctrine and in many cases it is similar to the Roman Catholic Compendium. In the areas mentioned, however, the Social Concept shows itself to be more conservative than the Compendium and more reluctant to accept secular civil society and biomedical technological possibilities or to speak out for existing human rights or democracy.
In this paper, I discuss and analyze three instances of exchange and interaction between Russian (incl. Soviet) and (West) European philosophical culture: the correspondence between Merab ...Mamardašvili and Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida's visit to Moscow in 1990, and a joint Russian-German publication by Nikolaj Plotnikov and Alexander Haardt. The focus is on the implicit mutual perception of philosophical cultures and on the 'micro-politics' of discourse that is at stake in their interaction. Also, it is shown how different contexts—labelled 'philosophical culture', though not in any deterministic sense—are at work in the mutual perception between individual thinkers. Even if philosophical thinking tends to transcend the parameters of 'glocal' situations, this involves a job that needs to be done, individually and collectively, by the philosophers involved. Consequently, this dimension has to be taken into account when analysing such instances of encounter.
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