Issue #49

Abstract: The article examines the literary and philosophical views of N.V. Stankevich, developed by him in the semantic context of the “aesthetic humanism” and historiosophical ideas that were established in Russian public thought. The author emphasizes the influence of N.V. Stankevich’s ideas on the mentality and spiritual orientations of Russian intellectuals of the first half of the 19th century. In this regard, the article provides an analysis of the socio-cultural situation of that time, its connection with the search for historiosophical explanations of Russia’s place in European culture. The author shows that Stankevich and the literary and philosophical circle he created, which brought together famous thinkers of his time, were the center of searches that very soon became the growth points of Russian philosophical thought. The article focuses on Stankevich’s ideas about the role of philosophy in achieving knowledge about the foundations of the universe, about the integrity of human perception of the world, about the unity of conceptual and artistic-imaginative ways of understanding it as the basic principle of historical and philosophical epistemology, about progress as the spiritual and moral improvement of mankind, about the subjective inclusion of personality in this process. These ideas, as shown in the article, by the middle of the 19th century had determined the problem field and the main vector of development of Russian socio-philosophical thought.