Kyiv philosophical school and spiritual self-determination of its founders: at the worldview intersection of atheism and faith

Abstract

The article examines the spiritual self-determination of the creators of the Kyiv philosophical school as an innovative humanitarian project of directors of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR P. Kopnin (1962–1968) and V. Shynkaruk (1968–2001). It arouse during Khrushchev "thaw" thanks to a generation of Ukrainian philosophers of the sixties and was one of the first academic prototype models of the open society in the Ukrainian SSR in the post-Stalin era. Its well-known founders witnessed significant and very contradictory changes in domestic and world church and religious life, especially the antireligious campaign in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s and the revival of the said life in Ukraine before and at the beginning of its independence. Over the past two decades, projects on the oral history of philosophy of T. Chaika and of Student Society of Oral History of Philosophy of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv have been going. Thanks to them, the final autobiographical reconstructions of academicians of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine S. Krymskyi, M. Popovych and V. Horskyi, as well as the ones of a group of their colleagues, the co-founders of the said school, in particular P. Yolon, M. Kashuba and Y. Stratii, were obtained. In combination with no less interesting memoirs of their colleagues at this school, first of all V. Lisovyi, they jointly presented a wide range of hitherto unknown evidence of the spiritual search of these creators of the Kyiv philosophical school as, in fact, the center of institutionalizing of Ukrainian national philosophical tradition in the 1960s – 1980s.