Vasily Sesemann: Experience, Formalism, and the Question of Being

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

yan, 2006 · On the Boundary of Two Worlds 7-kitob · Rodopi

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Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956).
Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophy. Sesemann's thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about dynamics and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger.
The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin.

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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein studied philosophy in Paris from1985 to 1990, received a Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1993, and a habilitation from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials of Paris in 2000. Since 1993, he has done research on Russian Formalism and semiotics in the former Soviet Union and the Baltic region, and on the philosophy of the Kyoto School in Japan. He is affiliated to the EHESS of Paris and currently working at Zhejing University in China.