Kantianism

Kantianism. The distinctive system of philosophy developed by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In Ukraine it received some attention, but never gained much of a following among thinkers. Information on Kant's philosophy was disseminated mostly by followers of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel such as Johann Baptist Schad in Kharkiv. Some of Kant's doctrines were expounded by Petro Lodii in his Logicheskie nastavleniia rukovodstvuiushchiia k poznaniiu i razlichiiu istinnogo ot lozhnogo (Logical Rules Leading to the Understanding of and Distinction between Truth and Falsehood, 1815) and by V. Dovhovych in his Extractus systematis Kantiani (manuscript). In the 1830s and 1840s Kant's philosophy was studied at the Kyiv Theological Academy from a historical point of view. Graduates of the academy such as Sylvestr Hohotsky and Pamfil Yurkevych devoted some attention to Kant: the first wrote Kriticheskii vzgliad na filosofiiu Kanta (A Critical View of Kant's Philosophy, 1847) and the second ‘Razum po ucheniiu Platona i opyt po ucheniiu Kanta’ (Reason According to Plato's Teaching and Experience According to Kant's Teaching, 1865). Towards the end of the century two professors of Kyiv University analyzed certain Kantian doctrines: A. Kozlov published Genesis teorii prostranstva i vremeni Kanta (The Genesis of Kant's Theory of Space and Time, 1884) and G. Chelpanov published Istoriia osnovnykh voprosov etiki (History of the Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 1897). Kant had a certain positivist influence on the later works of Volodymyr Lesevych. Some work on Kant was done at Odesa University: professor Nikolai Lange discussed Kant in his Istoriia nravstvennykh idei XIX v. (History of Moral Ideas of the 19th Century, 1888), and Mykhailo Hordiievsky published ‘Kriticheskii razbor dvukh pervykh antinomii Kanta’ (A Critical Analysis of Kant's First Two Antinomies, 1910) in the university's Zapiski (see Zapiski Imperatorskogo Novorossiiskogo universiteta). Bohdan Kistiakovsky's theory of method in the social sciences owes much to modern German Kantianism. A Ukrainian translation of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, edited and introduced by Ivan Mirchuk, was published in 1930.

Dmytro Chyzhevsky, Taras Zakydalsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]