The article analyses how the oral history of philosophy can be conceptualized as a genre and a discipline of the history of philosophy. The need for this kind of conceptualization arose due to recent spreading of interviews in the genre of the oral history of philosophy, which in turn became a subject for the special issue The Oral History of Philosophy in Filosofska Dumka. Analysing this issue, the author proves that the “dialoguing” nature of the interview builds inflated expectations about (...) the oral history as well as its boundaries as an approach in a historical-philosophical study. He also suggests distinguishing the interview as a genre of oral philosophy – dialogue, which is a traditional philosophical literary form, from a tool in historical-philosophical study. In the latter case, it is important to determine who will play a role of a historian: an author of historical narration, an interviewee or an interviewer. Depending on the answer to the previous question, the author distinguishes three possible perspectives of the oral history of philosophy development: an interview as a self-sufficient study in the history of philosophy, an interview as a self-sufficient source for historical-philosophical research and an interview as one of sources for historical-philosophical research. Each of them has its opportunities for a historian of philosophy and plays its role in recruiting students and doctoral students (who often are involved as interviewers) to research work. (shrink)

The article analyzes the translations and interpretations of the philosophical course Stephan Kalynovskyi taught at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1729–1731. Drawing on unpublished translations, editorial corrections, letters, etc., the author reconstructs the history of this course’s translation for the first time, which began in the late 1960s. The author analyzes whether the researchers transcribed and translated the handwritten Latin text correctly and to what extent their interpretations of the course’s philosophical ideas are valid. The article demonstrates that researchers neither had (...) the proper knowledge of the scholastic philosophical tradition and, in some cases, its specific type of Latin nor created the necessary critical apparatus. It resulted in many flaws in their works. Ukrainian philosophers grossly misinterpreted Kalynovskyi’s course because they found the Enlightenment, Cartesian, and local Ukrainian ideas in the text, written in Paris in the 1630s. The author also demonstrates that contemporary studies of Kalynovskyi’s course mostly repeat dubious Soviet ideas, while several dishonest scholars even practice plagiarism. (shrink)