Losev Alexei Fedorovich

Abstract

Alexei Losev (10[22].09.1893, Novocherkassk — 24.05.1988, Moscow), Russian philosopher, philologist and writer, is the creator of a unique religious-philosophical system, which combines the reinterpreted tradition of ancient and medieval thought (Plato and Neoplatonism, Christian apophatic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory Palamas, Nicholas of Cusa), the methodology of New European philosophy (German classical idealism, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology of E. Husserl) and the problems of New European philosophy (German classical idealism, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology of E. Husserl) and the problems of Russian religious philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from V.S. Solovyov (the idea of universalism) to P.A. Florensky. In the constructive design of Losev’s system the central place is occupied by dialectics, in the multidimensional construction of which each category and all of them together are worked out in the light of each other. Losev's personalistic ontology is the basis of his philosophy of language (naming as an interpretative-communicative self-discovery of personality), philosophy of myth as a distinctive form of personal worldview (myth as directly experienced and created reality, symbolically expressed), and aesthetics (artistic form is "personality as symbol and symbol as personality"). Losev was the founder of the philosophy of music in Russia. His multi-volume history of ancient aesthetics represents the history of the entire ancient culture revealed in its symbolic-expressive aspects. The works of Losev, a representative of the last generation of the Silver Age of Russian culture, became a kind of completion of Orthodox religious philosophy in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.