Logos, Culture, and the Constitution of Philosophy: The 1910 Ern–Frank Dispute in Russia

This article examines the 1910 philosophical dispute between Vladimir Ern and Semyon Frank in post-1905 Russia as a dispute over the criterion of philosophy itself. The controversy arose in a field where the meaning of “Russian philosophy,” the authority of neo-Kantian nauchnost’ scientificity, the religious-ontological program of Put’, and the problem of culture had become closely interconnected. The article argues that the central issue concerned what makes a claim philosophical: participation in an antecedent order of being, or conceptual articulation, proof, and universally valid justification. Ern’s intervention is presented as an attempt to reconstitute philosophy through Logos. For Ern, modern rationalism separates the discursive-logical from the “fullness of reason,” producing ratio as an autonomous and ultimately meonic form of thought; Logos, by contrast, names the ontological principle through which thought remains inwardly bound to being. Frank’s response locates the issue in the concept of philosophy itself. While acknowledging intuition, ontologism, and the insufficiency of one-sided rationalism, he insists that every appeal to being becomes philosophical only when it enters the medium of concepts, reasons, and proof. The article argues that the controversy turns on two irreducible conditions internal to philosophy itself: thought must remain faithful to being, yet it must do so in a form through which its claims become philosophically valid. Read in this way, the Ern–Frank exchange discloses a constitutive tension between ontology and conceptual justification, and between historical embodiment and universal validity.