Tradition and Polyglossia

Oleksiy Panych put forward two theses: (1) irrelevance of the concept of national philosophical tradition in the analysis of modern philosophical processes; (2) impossibility of building such a tradition in contemporary Ukraine, since this tradition is incompatible with the “internal polyglossiaˮ essential for Ukrainian philosophizing. I prove that the essential features of the national philosophical tradition highlighted by O. Panych do not take into account contemporary clarifications of this concept. Developing Serhiy Yosypenkoʼs idea about the institutional level of this tradition, I propose to understand it as a two-level social mechanism of self-reproduction of the national philosophical community within the limits of modern philosophical institutions. At the first level, this tradition appears as a result of the purely civil self-identification of each individual philosopher (it ensures the very existence and stability of the tradition), at the second one, multiple reflections are carried out regarding what this tradition is and where it comes from. The products of these levels do not reduce to each other and perform separate functions. This approach allows solving a number of complex theoretical problems, in particular the problem of the incompleteness of the criteria for defining the national philosophical tradition.