This article has a historiographical and a philosophical aim. The historiographical and most difficult objective is to provide a comprehensive presentation of F. W. J. Schelling’s doctrine of the potencies (Potenzlehre) for the English-speaking philosophical community as found in his, for the most part yet to be translated, late lectures on the positive philosophy of mythology and revelation. The philosophical objective is to show how this same doctrine provides a modern response to the assertion that thinking and Being are the (...) same, sometimes rendered as “Thinking and Being belong together” or “Where there is Being, there is thinking.”. (shrink)

Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by (...) placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis. (shrink)