Mikhail Naumovich Epstein

Mikhail N. Epstein (Mikhail Naumovich Epshtein) is a Russian–American philosopher, cultural and literary scholar and essayist. He is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (USA).

Born in Moscow in 1950, he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University in 1972 and has been a member of the Writers’ Union since 1978. He is the founder and head of several Moscow intellectual associations: The Club of Esseists (1982–1988), “Image and Thought” (1986–1989), and Laboratory of Contemporary Culture (1988–1989).

He moved from the USSR to the USA in 1990. In 1990–1991, he was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington, D.C. He has been teaching at Emory University since 1991. From 2012 to 2015, he served as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK).

Epstein’s research interests include new directions in the humanities and methods of intellectual creativity; contemporary philosophy and theology, in particular the philosophy of culture and language; the poetics and history of Russian literature; postmodernism; the semiotics of everyday life, and the evolution of language.

The general direction of Epstein’s work is the creation of multiple alternatives to the predominant theoretical models and sign systems. He explores and brings to systematic expression various forms of the thinkable and conceivable: potential philosophical systems and religious and artistic movements; new words, terms, and concepts; and new disciplines and approaches in the humanities. The most complete embodiment of this method is in his books: A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture (Russian edition 2001, English 2019); The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), From Knowledge to Creativity: How the Humanities Can Change the World (St. Petersburg, 2016). Briefly, possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its possibilities, of what it maybe as opposed to what it actually is. A world consisting only of actualities would be devoid of meaning and significance. Possibilist thinking is both critical and constructive. It generates many concepts, ideas, propositions, rules, and disciplines as alternatives to existing ones—those considered established, obvious, and rational. A possibility never comes alone, but only in the form of doubling and multiplying possibilities. They clash, but do not exclude one an-other. A possibility that excludes all others is a mere necessity.

The most representative work of Epstein’s philosophical and philological methodology is his A Projective Dictionary of the Humanities (Moscow: nlo, 2017). It introduces 440 concepts coined by the author that encompass general issues of the humanities, the philosophy of being and knowledge, society and technology, ethics, aesthetics, religious studies, culturology, literary studies, linguistics, and a number of emerging disciplines. The dictionary is heuristicin that it demonstrates various methods of forming new ideas, theories and research areas. The dictionary as a whole is of a systematic nature, but this is a particular sort of centrifugal system, one that presupposes the articulation of multiple concepts that cannot be reduced to a single compact scheme or broadest-possible primary concept. A centrifugal system like this, with concepts spinning off into various subject fields, differs from the better-known centripetal systems exemplified by Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The centrifugal type of thinking does not subject all the material of culture and history to an overall initial principle, but to the contrary, spawns an “expanding universe” of manifold intellectual practices and discourses that keep spreading further and further away from each other in the space of potential readings and texts. This open system relies on the reader to be a co-thinker and co-creator.

Epstein has authored 35 books and more than 800 articles and essays, some of which have been translated into 24 languages. He was the first scholar to shape a theory of Russian postmodernism, to affirm its place in global postmodernity, and to analyze the movements of metarealism, conceptualism, pre-sentalism, “arrière-garde” and “new sentimentality” in such books as After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture(U of Massachusetts P, 1995) and Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with A. Genis and S. Vladiv-Glover; Berghahn Books, 1999, 2016). He authored pioneering studies of late–Soviet and post–Soviet philosophy and religion, including a classification and analysis of eight schools of thought. He introduced the concepts of “transculture” and “transculturalism” (the practical branch of Russian culturology) and “minimal religion” as the transition from atheism to post–atheist spirituality—both ideas adopted by Western scholars—in such books as Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry, Palgrave– Macmillan, 1999); Religion after Atheism: New Possibilities for Theology (in Russian, ast–press, 2013); and The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Epstein created internet projects and initiatives, web sites such as “InteL-net” (since 1995), “The Book of Books” (since 1998), “The Gift of A Word: The Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language” (since 2000), “The Fan of Futures: The Techno-Humanistic Messenger” (2000–2003). He is the founder and head of the Expert Council of “Word of the Year” and “Neologism of the Year” (since 2007), as well as active participant in various social networks and blogs, including Facebook, Snob and LiveJournal. Epstein is а recipient of Andrei Bely Award (St. Petersburg, 1991), the prize of the London Institute of Social Inventions for intellectual creativity (1995), as well as the International Essay competition award (Berlin-Weimar, 1999), Liberty Prize (New York, 2000), and the journals Zvezda (2000) and Znaniesila(2011) awards. Many of his English and Russian publications can be accessed online. The most complete bibliography of his works and chronology of his scholarly activity is in Homo Scriptor Festschrift in Honor of M.N. Epshtein (Moscow: nlo, 2020).

Mikhail Epstein’s essay, “Ot analiza k sintezu. O prizvanii filosofii v xxi veke” (From Analysis to Synthesis: On the Calling of Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century), which appears in this anthology, was published in Russian in the journal, Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), no. 7 (2019), 52–63.