TUCH OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY has been unavailable to or unexplored by Western thinkers, which is unfortunate because the uniqueness of the Russian vision has much to contribute to Western inquiry. The Eternal in Russian Philosophy helps fill this intellectual lacuna by offering a genuinely philosophical introduction to the themes of Russian religious thought.

B. P. Vysheslavtsev was one of a constellation of Russian thinkers, including Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Florensky, whose voices were lost amid the din of Soviet censorship. It is only now that Vysheslavtsev's thought is becoming available to the West. This is the first of his works to be made available in English.

In The Eternal in Russian Philosophy Vysheslavtsev canvasses a range of perennial topics freedom, the nature and centrality of the person, the nature of grace and law, the role of the irrational in human nature and its sublimation, and conscious credos versus unconscious cultural assumptions. In the modern Western tradition, reason, the law, science, and the various brands of evoluti sary and Freudian psychology have all reduced human beings to a single dimension: the person is "nothing but a reasoning subject, a bundle of drives, a member of an economic class. Vysheslavtsev passionately contests each of these views, offer-ing instead a vision of people as "images of God," drawn to the Absolute by their very like ness to it.

Offering entirely new insights into issues that have long occupied Western minds, this is both a book about Russian philosophy and an excellent exemplar of it.