Teaching
The Idea of Public Reason
Liberal democratic citizens are free and equal persons. Therefore, they should make political decisions about the exercise of coercive state power only on the grounds of reasons that each of them may reasonably be expected to accept. This idea of public reason formulated by John Rawls is the key element of today’s mainstream political liberalism. We will try to grasp the exact meaning of Rawls’s idea, engage in a debate about its coherence, and explore how it may be applied in practice. Hopefully, this will bring us closer to answering the main question of contemporary political liberalism: How can free and equal citizens maintain a stable and just political society if they deeply disagree on the basic matters of morality, philosophy, and religion?
Designed in 2022
Political Philosophy Today
How to make sure that the immense coercive power of the state is used to defend and not to crush our liberties? What does justice mean in a pluralistic society where everyone seems to disagree with everyone else? Are democracies capable of solving the global problems of the 21st century? We will join contemporary political philosophers in the debates on these foundational questions and learn how to apply their conceptions to the hot button public controversies of the present day.
Designed in 2022
Theories of Justice
The course explores contemporary theories of distributive justice. We will start from John Rawls’s famous Difference Principle, discuss its multiple alternatives, and consider how they might inform the political decisions of today's democratic governments. At the end we will realize that justice is a much more complicated issue than we usually think, but fortunately there are reasonable ways of approaching it.
Designed in 2022
Theories of Democracy and Justice
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spring 2018, with Giorgi Tskhadaia
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spring 2017, Spring 2016, with Josep Costa
This course aims to address some of the main normative debates in the field of political theory, looking for responses to the challenges faced by contemporary societies. Among these, special attention is given to issues of cultural diversity and social inequality. The discussion of conceptual problems is combined with case studies.
Philosophy (in Russian)
Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2004-2015, various duration from ½ year to 1 year long (min. 18 lectures, 9 discussions; max. 34 lectures, 34 discussions)
The course discusses the most important ideas and figures in all philosophical disciplines from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics and politics, from Parmenides and Plato to Wittgenstein and Derrida.
After the Tyranny: A Philosophical Attempt to Make Sense of the Soviet Totalitarian Legacy (in Russian)
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Spring 2014
My aim was to trace the becoming of the ‘Soviet tyrannical man’, to understand what happened to that character after the Soviet tyranny had collapsed, and to find out what we might want to happen next. I gathered intuitions from such philosophical sources as Plato’s Republic, Freud’s Psychology of the Masses, and Agamben’s Homo Sacer and applied them to a number of Soviet ‘documents of the epoch’ — Stalin’s speeches, Bulgakov’s, Sholokhov’s, and Solzhenitsyn’s novels etc.
Introduction to Epistemology (in Russian)
Designed in 2014
An anthology for the PhD school admission exam in philosophy for the students of natural science faculties at Lomonosov Moscow State University.