Lots and lots of rights?

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Thu Apr 4 07:59:16 PST 2002



>
>I say: Are you advocating a Straussian reading of Soviet philosophy? :)

Actually I'm not advocating raeding Soviet philosophy at all. But there a Straussian reading makes sense, since the philosophers had to had an esoteric meaning if the were to say anything interesting at all.


>
>I really don't buy the democracy makes for better philosophy line (Seneca,
>Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus, Moses Maimonides,
>etc.).

The thing about the philosophy of premodern times is that even there doctrine was not so finely enforced. The ancients could teach anything, pretty much. In the middle ages you had to be a theist and if you were a Christian had to navigate around the Index, but it left more room for manuever than in Soviet philosophy, and there's no reason to think that the scholastics experienced the imposition of Christianity as a requirement to lie, as Soviet philosophers did.
>


>
>Russians and ex-Sovs teld to be widly more philosophical than Americans
>(not
>to mention infinitely better-read). I've never come across a
>better-educated
>bunch of people in my life, or a group more given to introspection,
>espacially people who were socialized in the Union.

Yes, I said as much. But that's a matter of being Russian.

Why
>on Earth did they try to limit access to Schopenhauer and Freud? I get the
>feeling that often some higher-up in the CPSU would read something, find it
>personally distasteful or offensive, and declare it unclean.
>

Clearly.

jks

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