“From Myth to Logos Is a Dystopia” | Vadym Menzhulin on the Dangers of Pure Rationalism

🎙️ Dear friends, we are delighted to present a new episode of “Philosophical Community,” a project by the Sententiae Community!

▪️ Host – Vlada Davidenko, researcher and editor at Archivum Sententiarum.

▪️ Guest – Vadym Menzhulin, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, historian of philosophy, and scholar specializing in philosophical biography, the history of psychology, and psychoanalysis.

▪️ In this episode, we explore how a philosopher’s life becomes part of their philosophy and why the history of philosophy cannot be reduced to a history of established ideas and concepts. Beginning with Vadym Menzhulin’s personal journey into philosophy – through music, jazz, and chess – we move on to discuss academic philosophy, psychoanalysis, the biographical approach, and the complexities of historical inquiry.

📚 In this episode, we discuss:

▪️ whether a philosopher’s way of thinking, academic work, and way of life should be interconnected;

▪️ jazz and chess as intellectual practices and their influence on the practice of philosophizing;

▪️ the relationship between academic philosophy and free intellectual creativity – and why philosophers sometimes need to “jazz things up a little”;

▪️ psychoanalysis, Freud, and Jung – and how an interest in myth and the unconscious led to questions of philosophical biography;

▪️ the biographical approach in the history of philosophy: what changes when, behind a seemingly complete philosophical system, we recognize not an abstract “author” but a human being whose views develop, change, contradict one another, and are shaped by lived experience;

▪️ autobiography, ego-history, and oral history as ways of restoring the open-endedness and internal dynamics of the history of thought;

▪️ the figure of Ivan Sikorsky – a Kyiv-based psychiatrist, psychologist, and researcher whose biography raises questions about scientific achievements, racial anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his disgraceful role in the Beilis trial;

▪️ how historians can approach controversial figures of the past without turning historical inquiry into either justification or a final verdict;

▪️ why the history of philosophy should leave room for contradictions, alternative interpretations, and future generations of researchers.

📺 Watch the video version on the Sententiae Community YouTube channel!

We thank NONTHENSE for supporting our project and Roman for his continued assistance with sound production and editing.

See you in the next episode of “Philosophical Community”!