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Vladimir Bibikhin’s Ontological Hermeneutics
This article examines V. V. Bibikhin‘s recently published series of lectures, “Property. Philosophy of the self,” which he delivered at Moscow’s Lomonosov University in 1993–1994. In it, he creatively develops Heidegger’s project of “phenomenological destruction”: a critical analysis of the traditional arsenal of classical ontology and modern European philosophy (substantialism and subjectivism) guided by the question of being and working through a new reading of classical thought (Alcibiades I). The command “Know thyself” demands we address the question of one’s own, that which is proper to the self, selfhood—a direct a priori given of human existence. In Bibikhin’s definition of “one’s own,” primary importance is allotted not to the “private self” (with its engagement with innerworldly things), but to the relationship with the whole world, out of which relationship the emergence of the subject is for the first time made possible. The article analyzes the original interpretations of such concepts as “property,” “world,” and “capture” put forth in Bibikhin’s philosophy.