Latvian Philosophical Ideas in Exile – Possibilities of Conceptualization

Latvian Philosophical Ideas in Exile – Possibilities of Conceptualization

Velga Vēvere The present article is devoted to the Latvian philosophers and development of their philosophical ideas in exile after the World War II. The most important methodological questions put forward are the following: how to bring together thinkers residing in different countries and associated with a variety of philosophical traditions? What criteria should be used for the selection of material and respective authors? Should we include in the project those thinkers who are not philosophers in an academic sense, i.e., those practicing literary and social criticism and those engaged in religious and culture studies? How to define the concept “philosophical ideas”? What are the relations between the thinkers and the diaspora, and between the thinkers and the Latvian intellectual milieu? To answer those questions and attain some common vision, the paper proposes to introduce the term geography of philosophical ideas based on the concept of culture geography. This approach makes it possible to obtain a somewhat spatial view of these ideas by applying the so-called intellectual mapping to this field. It must be noted that these theoretical constructs grew naturally out of the material itself (at least the extra philosophical part of it), from studies by E. V. Bunkse of human geography and from the research in post-Enlightenment rationality and on M. Foucault’s critical theory by K. Racevskis. The “social event” (in M. Foucault’s terms) that forms the centre of gravity of the present project is the fact of return to Latvia (although more often intellectually than physically). The article consists of three parts – the first part is devoted to the methodological questions (“Topography of philosophical ideas”), the second part – to the notion of exile (“Displaced philosophy”), while the third and the final part – to the structure of a prospective book on the subject (“Outlining the project”).