Reflections on the Linguistic Paradigms of Russian Religious Thought. Apropos The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 712 pp.

This article was written is connection with the publication of the new Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought. It considers the reception of twentieth-century Russian religious thought in the English-speaking academy, as well as the importance of linguistic questions in this tradition. Three ‘linguistic paradigms’ are analysed: dialogue, translation and the proposition. In Russian religious thought, these paradigms are interpreted as phenomena that reveal the object of philosophical thought: philosophy is dialogue, or translation, or a proposition. The publication of the Oxford Handbook corresponds to the first paradigm, as the latest step in a continuous dialogue between Russian religious thought and the West. This article emphasises that this dialogue is not incidental, insofar as ‘dialogue’ is not only a crucial concept in this tradition (Soloviev, Ivanov, Bakhtin), but is its very form. Then, this article highlights the significance of the work of Robert Bird. Bird’s work enables a philosophical conception of translation, as the interpretation of the idiom of Russian religious thought in terms of the language of another culture. Finally, this article analyses the theories of S.N. Bulgakov, A.F. Losev and S.S. Khoruzhii, and their significance for contemporary religious thought in the West.