Talk 7: Philosophy, God-Seeking, and Developmental Psychology: Stolitsa and Volkovich in Late Imperial Russia. Talk 8: The Metaphysical Tenacity of Barbara Skarga – Metaphysics in Totalitarianism

Maxim Denim, Patricia Guevara Wozniak, Jil Muller (Paderborn University), Daniel Fischer, Katia Raya Rami, Marguerite El Asmar Bou Aoun (Saint Joseph University of Beirut, Lebanese American University)

Register here: https://indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/156/

19.05.2026, 4.30-6pm (Paris time)

Maxim Demin - Philosophy, God-Seeking, and Developmental Psychology: Stolitsa and Volkovich in Late Imperial Russia

This presentation examines the philosophical project of two largely forgotten Russophone women thinkers, Zinaida Stolitsa (1873–1956) and Vera Volkovich (1873–1962). As co-authors and lifelong partners, they developed a distinctive body of work at the intersection of religious philosophy, developmental psychology, and pedagogical reform during the final decades of the Russian Empire. Their voices, once publicly visible, were later marginalized and silenced under Soviet rule.Stolitsa and Volkovich strategically used a wide range of media and communicative forms to articulate a female philosophical voice within the early twentieth-century God-Seeking movement. Their collaborative writings, most notably the manifesto The Future in Our Hands (1909), combined speculative religious philosophy with emerging scientific approaches to child psychology. They published philosophical essays, reviews, and programmatic statements of their independent society, and they also participated in international scholarly events in Geneva (1909) and The Hague (1912). These diverse communicative strategies enabled them to claim intellectual authority within discourses traditionally dominated by men. Their reworking of central theological and philosophical concepts, particularly Stolitsa’s reinterpretation of Man-Godhood, formulated partly in a one-sided polemic with figures such as Nikolai Berdiaev, provided a conceptual foundation for their broader agenda of moral, spiritual, and national renewal. Their work also contributed to the early twentieth-century feminisation of pedagogical expertise, placing women at the center of discussions on education and child development. The paper will highlight the paradoxical ideological constellation that shaped their project: an upper-class background combined with conservative moral views; openness to feminist concerns; aspirations for international intellectual exchange; and, simultaneously, elements of Russian imperial nationalism and cultural chauvinism on the eve of the First World War. The presentation will also draw on archival photographs and visual materials, offering a tangible sense of their intellectual and social world.

About the Speaker: Maxim Demin is a research fellow at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). His main interest is post-Hegelian philosophy and its intellectual development in German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century. Before moving to Bochum, he taught for nearly a decade at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE) in St. Petersburg and Moscow, offering courses in critical thinking, philosophy of science, metaethics, and moral psychology. His current project explores Russian philosophical and public debates on the emergence of studies of human and animal psychology and mental phenomena, tracing the transfer of psychological knowledge from the early nineteenth century to the early Soviet regime.

Patricia Guevara Wozniak - The Metaphysical Tenacity of Barbara Skarga - Metaphysics in Totalitarianism

Contrary to twentieth-century proclamations of the “death of metaphysics” and the erosion of truth, Barbara Skarga persistently defended the metaphysical dimension of human existence. For Skarga, metaphysicality constitutes the core of being; its eradication would entail a loss of humanity itself. Her philosophical stance gains particular significance when considered against the backdrop of totalitarian experience, including her imprisonment in the Gulag.

Skarga’s reflection on metaphysics centers on the notion of the source of being, explored primarily through the categories of time, evil, and experience. In a series of philosophical essays, she emphasizes both the difficulty and the ethical-intellectual value of seeking the origins of being. She critically engages classical conceptions of time—physical, psychological, and cosmological—while foregrounding lived temporality as structured by finitude. Her analysis of evil exposes philosophy’s enduring struggle to comprehend it: as privation of good, corruption of human nature, or an inescapable dimension of social violence, paradoxically accompanied by utopian visions of moral redemption. Addressing experience as a source of being, she enters into dialogue with thinkers such as Plotinus, Husserl, and Heidegger.

After returning from the Gulag in 1955 and completing her studies, Skarga joined the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, remaining associated with it throughout her career. Although her early academic choices were shaped by Adam Schaff’s centrally planned research agenda, they ultimately became foundational to her intellectual development and to the formation of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas.

Skarga’s work can be divided into five stages: studies of Polish and French positivism; research on non-positivist currents in nineteenth-century French philosophy, culminating in her engagement with Bergson; a metaphilosophical reflection on the methodology of the history of philosophy; a “post-critical” metaphysics informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics; and, finally, moral and civic essays affirming the durability of European values. Rather than offering rigid definitions, Skarga reveals the plurality of meanings and historical configurations through which metaphysical questions persist.

About the Speaker: Patricia Guevara Wozniak is a Doctor of Humanities in the field of philosophy, editor, academic lecturer, and educator. A graduate of the Academy of Film and Television. She has collaborated with the Academy of Art and Design and with Pedagogium – the University of Social Sciences in Warsaw. She is currently a lecturer at Kozminski University. She is a beneficiary of the Culture in the Network program awarded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and administered by the National Centre for Culture. She is the editor-in-chief of the nationwide monthly Remedium (remedium-psychologia.pl), funded by the Ministry of Health and administered by the National Centre for the Prevention of Addictions, a professional magazine providing up-to-date information on modern methodologies of education and prevention.