Deism: Rethinking the Term

The author of this article presents modern approaches to the study of deism. It is shown that these are closely connected to the rethinking and search for methods of studying the period in the history of ideas known as the "Age of Enlightenment". The sources include the works of Jonathan Israel, Jeffrey Wigelsworth, Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and Sarah Barnett. In the second part of the article the author describes the history of the formation of the terms deism and deist in Russian studies based on pre-revolutionary Russian dictionaries, encyclopedias, and monographs. The purpose of the article is to problematize the terms deism and deist. A number of modern (late 20th – early 21st centuries) works are analyzed in this article, the authors of which propose to question the established meanings of these terms. Also, the author follows the history of the formation of these terms in Russian studies. The article discovers interesting parallels between modern methodological guidelines and Russian pre-revolutionary approaches to the study of deism in the academic environment. The author of the article uses the works of those modern authors who have been consistently studying deism for a long time. The article raises the question of the heuristic value of the ideas of Russian pre-revolutionary researchers for the modern studies of deism. It points out an omission in Russian studies when it comes to discourse about deism, namely, ignoring those approaches of researchers in pre-revolutionary Russia where they were looking for historical sources of deistic thought beyond the philosophy of the Enlightenment and beyond the established definitions. The results of the work can be applied in educational and methodological courses on the topic of the philosophy of religion of the Enlightenment and the history of Russian researches in religious studies. The article provides an argument in favor of the relevance of the views of A.A. Kozlov and V.D. Kudryavtsev-Platonov on deistic philosophy. The author of the article believes that their conclusions are similar to the conclusions of modern foreign English-speaking researchers.