The Third Research Seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism»

On March 29, the third research seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism» took place, during which Pavel Yushin presented a report entitled «Pavel Florensky and Rejected Knowledge».

Answering a seemingly paradoxical question about what is common between such disparate practices as hypnotism and spectral analysis, the speaker discussed a number of fragments from Pavel Florensky’s works (mainly those included in the collection of his later works titled «At the Watersheds of Thought: The Elements of a Concrete Metaphysics», 1917–1922) in connection to the larger problem of interaction between scientific and esoteric («rejected») knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century. The role of scientific instruments in Florensky’s philosophical anthropology was highlighted: revitalizing the largely forgotten Christian tradition of epistemological reflection based on the story of The Fall of Man, Florensky's reinterpreted the popular theory of «organ projection» and the idea of the instrumental «extension of our senses» in a way that construed cognitive practices as parts of the process of restoration of Adam’s prelapsarian body and knowledge. This conceptual move was facilitated by the widespread notion of the relativity of knowledge, a brief and preliminary history of which was outlined at the end of the presentation.