In his book Appearance and Sense Gustav Shpet, comparing Immanuel Kant’s transcendental logic with the traditional probleтs of the philosophy of language, thought it appropriate and conceptually effective to turn to the medieval scholastic debate on universals. Later, in the Hermeneutics and Its Problems, he goes back to this discussion and notes that it was the framework in which the thirteenth-century tradition of “terminist” logic was formed. Shpet attributed the fruitfulness of this approach to his concept of the inner form (...) of the word. Terminist logic is based on the definition and analysis of such terms as significatio, suppositio, expositio, exponibilia, and Shpet, in examining them, demonstrates the consonance of his concept with terminist logic. Proceeding from thirteenth-century logical studies, he proposes his own approach to resolving the contradictions found in Kant’s critical philosophy. Shpet believed that transcendental idealism failed to resolve the problem of the relation between intuition and concept (even though Kantian “schematism” was a search for such resolution). This inherent Kantian problem is for Shpet a take-off point to which he kept returning throughout his career. I will pay particular attention to such works as Appearance and Sense, in which Shpet broadens the problematics of Husserl’s phenomenology, and The Inner Form of the Word, in which he reinterprets Humboldt’s philosophy of language. In both cases Shpet shows that neither Husserl nor Humboldt managed to overcome the Kantian contradiction. So the reference to Kant is a starting point from which Shpet proceeds to put forward and consolidate his hypotheses. It is in thirteenth-century terminist logic that Shpet will see an original way of overcoming the Kantian contradiction and direct us toward interpreting the problems of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The archive of Gustav Shpet contains scattered preparatory materials for his works. Some of these handwritten rough drafts are devoted to Immanuel Kant. These jottings enable us to take a new look at possible trajectories of philosophical anthropology. The main goal of this article is to show, on the one hand, the modern relevance of Kant’s reflections on the essence of the human being and, on the other hand, the productiveness of their critical reinterpretation by Shpet. In effect, Kant’s reflections (...) give us an insight into the sources of the current anthropological crisis when “the free man”, capable of creating himself, has finally detached himself from his nature (i.e. accomplished what Kant believed to be the foundation of anthropology). Shpet’s critique enables us to outline the contours of a positive way out of today’s critical situation. To implement this task, the authors carry out a historical-philosophical analysis of Shpet’s treatment of the question of philosophical anthropology. This is a new approach both for Shpet scholarship and for the Russian philosophical tradition, an approach that opens up a new path to overcome the crisis and, what is more, a path that is ecologically significant. This gives us all the more reason to try to find the critical points of anthropologism (easy enough if we turn to Shpet’s article “The Anthropologism of Lavrov in Light of the History of Philosophy”). It also encourages us to reinterpret in an anthropological context Shpet’s reflections on the human being and humanness (see the article “Wisdom or Reason?”). The Supplement contains the first ever publication of a historical document, a letter Shpet received from the German embassy in 1924, inviting him to Königsberg for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Kant’s birth and a programm of the event with the names of speakers and the topics of their presentations. (shrink)