Using Irony for Doing History of Philosophy: The Lesson of Aleksej Losev.

Journal title RIVISTA DI STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA
Author/s Iva Manova
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2020/3 Language Italian
Pages 16 P. 529-544 File size 120 KB
DOI 10.3280/SF2020-003008
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The article considers one aspect of the multi-faceted philosophical legacy of Aleksej Losev, namely his scholarly output dedicated to the history of philosophy and produced in the period after 1953. It is stated that Losev’s entire post-Stalinist production sounds, to an astute reader, like a grand parable whose meaning is both conveyed and hidden at the moment of the narration. In the works in question, Losev’s strategy consisted in developing an historical-philosophical discourse as the main tool for announcing and spreading his own philosophy. That being said, the aim of the article is to shed light on the way in which Losev had recourse to irony in his texts, in order to build up a stratification of levels of meaning . The author analyses two sample texts by Losev: his entry on "Neoplatonism" for the fourth volume of the famous Soviet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and his highly successful book on the Aesthetics of the Renaissance (1978).

Keywords: Neoplatonism, Christian Neoplatonism, history of philosophy, Russian philosophy, Renaissance philosophy

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Iva Manova, Usare l’ironia per fare storia della filosofia: la lezione di Aleksej Losev in "RIVISTA DI STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA" 3/2020, pp 529-544, DOI: 10.3280/SF2020-003008