Aesthetics as intentio prima. On the religious materialism of Alexei Fedorovich Losev – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Oleg V. Aronson
The Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences
12/1 Goncharnaya Str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 109240
Senior Research Fellow
PhD in Philosophy
e-mail: olegaronson@yandex.ru
ORCID: 0000-0001-6753-7724

Aesthetics as intentio prima. On the religious materialism of Alexei Fedorovich Losev

Abstract: The article attempts to examine the philosophy of Alexei Fedorovich Losev from the perspective of the material turn that took place in Western philosophy at the turn of the centuries. Comparing the main ideas and motives of the representatives of speculative realism and transcendental materialism with the key provisions of Losev’s books of the 1920s, one can notice that both the criticism of correlationism and the affirmation of the reality of mathematical objects (Quentin Meillassoux) as well as of the materiality of ideas (Iain Hamilton Grant) are quite consistent with what Losev understood by dialectics. Both contemporary materialists and Losev criticize Aristotelian causality and the metaphysical separation of matter and form, as well as Kantian transcendentalism. Both Grant and Losev attempt to return to Plato, bypassing “Platonism”, where Plato is read through the prism of Aristotle’s categorical apparatus. This “return” is made possible due to two factors: 1) Losev’s philosophy of name that included an interpretation of the theory of transfinite sets, in which Losev himself, Florensky and the mathematicians of Luzin’s circle saw the possibility of a theological justification of onomatodoxy; 2) a forced, but very productive recourse to historical materialism, which in Losev’s case actually became the language of his aesthetic theory. Investigating the material and sensory cosmos of the ancient Greeks, Losev reinstates the Platonic dialectic, where there is no division into the ideal and the material, but the reality (and not transcendence) of an extrasensory order instead. Thus, it is through a reading of ancient philosophy in aesthetic terms that he manages to restore the reality of general categories and concepts, thereby indirectly rehabilitating the realists of historical scholasticism. This, in fact, is something that contemporary materialism based on Spinoza’s monism, Schelling’s naturalism and Bergson’s vitalism has come very close to as well.

Key words: Alexey Fedorovich Losev, matter, dialectics, set theory, philosophy of name (onomatodoxy), new materialism, realism, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant

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For Citation:

Aronson, O. (2021) Aesthetics as intentio prima. On the religious materialism of Alexei Fedorovich Losev. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (45). 6–20. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2021_4_6

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2021_4_6