Lev Shestov’s Philosophical View

Abstract

Being a peculiar thinker and understood as an out-sider, Lev Shestov is the creator of a philosophy that, continuing the work of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard or Dostoievki, among others, comes to break for rebuild; this means that he creates a thought shaped by his Jewish roots, Russian culture as well as the philosophy and the religion, accompanied by a critical view through which he manages to lay the foundations of a philosophy with a tragic sense that opposes all speculative and positivist thinking. For Shestov, scientism, positivism and philosophy, reduced themselves to an abstract thinking, represent a threat to separate human beings from their tragic destiny, from their consciousness of finitu-de, as well as from faith itself, limiting philosophical thinking to abstractions that do not respond to the fundamental questions of existence. In these pages I intend to analyze this philosophical universe of the Shestovian tradition with the aim of highlighting the importance of rescuing a thinker like him, in the context of the increasingly reductionist philosophical thinking of our time.