This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The interview has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original interview can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel under the heading: ‘What Good is Philosophy? – A Benefit Conference for Ukraine.’
Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere has published edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the past few weeks.We now reproduce Aaron’s interview with Margaret Atwood as a conclusion to the series.
Of course, history is important, but it is not decisive. As we are not slaves to the current conditions, we are not slaves to our history. We are not really defined by what was said. We are creators of ourselves. I think it is in the dialogue, in thinking and in the exchange of thoughts that we can decide what we want to be, what is really important to us. And that is the moment where philosophical thinking becomes not just a matter of academia but a matter of public strength.
This is the latest interview in the Beyond the Ivory Tower series and part of our series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. Costanza Porro spoke with Professor Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy and her experience of teaching in wartime Ukraine. Bila is the director of the philosophy department at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University and a PhD from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context. Together with Joshua Duclos, she wrote an essay on teaching philosophy, originally published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which we published in an edited form as part of our ongoing series on the Russia-Ukraine War.
Karazin Business School, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland.
This is a guest post by Orysya Bila (Ukrainian Catholic University) and Joshua Duclos (St Paul’s School), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
Why teach philosophy in wartime Ukraine? It’s a fair question. It’s a necessary question. Given the variety and gravity of Ukraine’s urgent needs, few will think to themselves: “But what about philosophy? Is Ukraine getting enough philosophy?” As two scholars committed to teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine – one American, one Ukrainian – we believe an explanation is in order.
St. Michael’s Square, Kyiv, June 2022. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland
This is a guest post by Dr Nataliia Viatkina(National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine/American University Kyiv), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled, “The Missing Conversation”, with the subtitle, “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, Professors Lorraine Daston and Peter Harrison. What is their conversation about?
As it turns out, one reason for their discussion is the question: Would a boycott of Russian scientists be an effective protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? This is not the only question—there are several others, and all of them lead to the article’s main topic: scientists and historians have stopped communicating with each other. Both Professors believe that now is the time to resume the dialogue.
St. Sophia’s Catherdral, Kyiv, November 2023. Photograph by Aaron J Wendland
This is a guest post by Professor George Pattison (University of Glasgow), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
Nine months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he argued that although Western leaders always claim to be the champions of freedom, Western liberalism was now engaged in the complete suppression of anything that contradicted its view of what was socially and culturally desirable. As he told his audience, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky prophetically foretold all this back in the 19th century”. Specifically, Putin cites Shigalev, one of the nihilistic conspirators in The Possessed (or Demons). Shigalev is a gloomy theorist who realizes that his plans for unlimited freedom will result in unlimited despotism. “This,” says Putin, “is what our Western opponents have come to”. Specifically, he applies Shigalev’s remark to the so-called “cancel culture” of the West, comparing it to Nazi book-burning and contrasting it with the fact that, even during the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders maintained a respect for each other’s cultural achievements (indeed, I remember posters outside one of our local venues advertising the Red Army choir and dancers). Probably referring to the cancellation of a course on Dostoevsky at Milan-Bicocca University days after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin told his listeners that even Dostoevsky is now cancelled in the West—ignoring the fact that the course was swiftly reinstated following a public outcry.
The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga. Painting by the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This is a guest post by Professor Cynthia R Nielsen (University of Dallas), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
To draw upon different strands of history for the purpose of creating, strengthening, or re-imagining a national narrative is not in itself problematic and, in fact, is common to most, if not all, states. Yet when one’s historically informed (or de-formed) narrative is transformed into a History that cannot be contested or challenged and is used to colonize, exploit, and justify waging aggressive and unjust wars on other sovereign states—or as Vladimir Putin did with Chechnya, autonomous territories within one’s own borders—one’s Historical narrative becomes a propagandistic weapon.
Saltivka, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland
This is a guest post by Professor Gerald Lang (University of Leeds), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
Peace is better than war.It takes two to fight. These are truisms: they’re true, but so obvious that they’re not usually worth stating. But they swiftly generate conundrums in the ethics of war in general, and the Ukraine conflict in particular. We can learn something, in my view, from thinking about these conundrums. But we may need to tackle the understandable concern that it’s unhelpfulto explore them at a time when energy and attention levels are flagging in the international community, even though Ukraine remains under attack from Russia and arguably requires all the support, moral and otherwise, that it can get. In some circumstances, indulging in more theoretical speculations—the kind of speculative and hypothetical thinking that forms the daily diet of philosophers of war—may come across as being objectionably detached, or perhaps as just another way of being a useful idiot. These worries deserve careful consideration, not hasty dismissal. If there’s to be a place for serious philosophizing about war, it needs to be reconciled with the more engaged concerns of those who care deeply about the Ukraine war but lack specifically philosophical concerns about it.
This is a guest post by Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford University), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.
There are three wars currently in progress in Ukraine: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainian war against Russia. It is necessary for the purpose of evaluation to make these distinctions, for the first of these wars is, like the Second World War (understood as a war between allied and axis powers), neither just nor unjust. Only a war fought by one or more belligerents against an opponent can be just or unjust. Many or most of what we refer to as wars consist of a just war on one side and an unjust war on the other – or, to be more precise, a war with predominantly just aims on one side and a war with predominantly unjust aims on the other.
There is no credible understanding of a just war according to which the Russian war against Ukraine is a just war. It is a wholly unprovoked war of aggression intended by those who initiated it – primarily Putin – to conquer Ukraine, annex its territory, and assimilate its population. The motives of the war’s planners are doubtless many and various but some stand out as obvious and dominant. One is to expand the Russian empire until it is at least coextensive with its earlier boundaries under the tsars and the post-revolutionary Soviet dictators. Another motivation echoes the American concern about “falling dominoes” as a reason for invading Vietnam. Many of the states that were ruled by Soviet puppet regimes during the Cold War have, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, been adopting more and more elements of Western culture, in particular liberalism and democracy. Ukraine was a falling domino that threatened to become a fully independent, economically flourishing democracy in a large border territory that Russia had repeatedly ravaged in the past – a state that would be an example, highly visible to Russians, of an appealing alternative to Putin’s tyrannical kleptocracy.
Warsaw-Kyiv train, Chełm, July 2023. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland.
This lecture was delivered by Dr Volodymyr Yermolenko as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel. Several themes from this lecture have been developed and expanded upon in Professor Snyder’s forthcoming book: On Freedom.
This blog explores issues of justice, morality, and ethics in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. It is run by a cooperative of political theorists and philosophers and in collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
